Supranational describes a body, law, or authority that sits *above* individual countries rather than beside them. The European Union is the standard example: when member states accept an EU ruling that overrides their own national law, that power is supranational. Compare it with *international*, which students often assume is the same thing — international means *between* nations, who remain in charge of themselves (the Olympics, a trade deal), while supranational means the nations have handed some of that authority upward to a shared body that can bind them. That single difference is the whole word. It belongs to politics, law, and economics writing; you will meet it in news analysis and textbooks, almost never in speech. Stress it as su-pra-NA-tion-al.