Totalitarian describes a political system where the government controls everything and ordinary people have no power at all. Not just the laws and the army — also the newspapers, the television, the schools, the courts, which books you may read, what you may say to your neighbour, sometimes even what you are supposed to believe. There is one party, no real election, and no legal way to disagree.

The key idea is in the word: TOTAL control. This is what separates it from ordinary dictatorship. A plain dictator may only want obedience — do not challenge me, and otherwise live your life. A totalitarian state wants the whole of you: your public behaviour and your private thoughts. It reaches into the family, the classroom, and the mind. That is why writers reach for this word about Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and North Korea, rather than about every unpleasant government.

It works as an adjective ("a totalitarian regime", "a totalitarian state") and, less often, as a noun for a person who supports such a system. The related noun for the system itself is totalitarianism.

A caution about how it is really used. In careful writing it is a precise historical and political term. In arguments online it gets thrown at any rule someone dislikes — a school uniform policy, a mask requirement, a company's email rules. That is the word being stretched far past its size, and when it is stretched that way it stops meaning much. Keep it for governments, and for serious ones.

Stress: to-tal-i-TAIR-i-an.