a1610 J. Healey tr. Theophrastus Characters (1636) 89 Olygarches [Gk. ὀλιγαρχικὸς], or principal men in a state, have these conditions.

1821 Ld. Byron Two Foscari ii. i, in Sardanapalus 226 Groan'd under the stern oligarchs.

1849 G. Grote Hist. Greece V. ii. xliii. 287 He established the oligarchs in that town as citizens and sold the Demos as slaves.

1868 Spectator 14 Nov. 1333 In mediæval Hungary, the central power of the Crown had to contend with that of the great territorial oligarchs.

1906 T. Hardy Dynasts: Pt. 2nd vi. vii. 300 The rawest Dynast..Will..Down-topple to the dust like soldier Saul, And Europe's mouldy-minded oligarchs Be propped anew.

1967 D. L. Thomas Plungers & Peacocks xii. 249 Lavish living..was indulged in only by vulgar upstarts with a few million dollars in their pockets and not by the oligarch whose fortunes were almost too large to count.

1976 Survey Summer 14 How seriously the ageing oligarchs of the Politbureau take this theme is hard to estimate.

1991 Economist 5 Oct. 26/1 The oligarchs in Beijing are willing to indulge such foibles of the traditionally independent south, but only so long as they pose no overt challenge to communist rule or to the unity of China.

1999 N.Y. Times 22 Aug. i. 22/6 Menatep, now virtually insolvent, is part of an industrial empire overseen by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of Russia's prominent financiers, or so-called ‘oligarchs’.

2009 Vanity Fair Oct. 235/1 If to their many critics they were ‘bandit capitalist’, kleptocrats who had enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people, it was the term ‘oligarch’ that would stick because of their formidable political power.

2014 Wall St. Jrnl. (Electronic ed.) 27 June He described the rise of oligarchs like himself in Ukraine as a natural stage in the transition of some countries to democracy, similar to the robber barons of the U.S. at the beginning of the 1900s.

1884 F. O. Bower & D. H. Scott tr. H. A. de Bary Compar. Anat. Phanerogams & Ferns 353 In almost all Dicotyledons where the point has been investigated, the original bundle of the root is oligarch, usually with 2, 3, or 4 rays, more rarely with 6 or 8.

1908 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) B. 199 413 The stele has an oligarch xylem which varies from a tri- to a hex- arch form.