Hegemony

Hegemony (from the Greek for 'leader') has traditionally been pronounced in British academic circles with a hard '-g-', as in 'get', not as in 'orange', and the stress on the second syllable: 'hegg-EM-en-y' IPA: /hɛ (or ɪ or ə) ˈgɛ mən ɪ/; OED gives 'hedge-EMM-en-y (IPA: /hɛ (or ə) ˈdʒɛ mən ɪ/) as a secondary pronunciation, while another pair of realizations stress the first syllable, 'HEGG (or HEDGE)-em-en-y', /ˈhɛ (or iː) g (or dʒ) ɛ mən ɪ/. LPD has these as variant (i.e. minority) realizations in the UK, with 'hedge-EMM-en-y (IPA: /hɛ (or ə) ˈdʒɛ mən ɪ/) as the majority pronunciation in the USA, where there is a less usual form HEDGE e moan y', with secondary stress on the third syllable: IPA: /ˈhɛ (or iː) g (or dʒ) ɛ ˌmoʊ (UK: əʊ)n ɪ/.

AWE's advice is to use 'hegg-EMM-en-y' IPA: /hɛ (or ɪ or ə)  ˈgɛ mən ɪ/
            until 'corrected' by your teacher or equivalent respectable authority

The meaning of this word appears to be changing. Chambers in 1959 gave it as "leadership: preponderant influence, esp. of one state over others." In this sense, its most common use in English was to describe the most important state - which changed from time to time - in the loose and shifting coalition of Anglo-Saxon states which were resisting the Vikings in the eighth and ninth centuries, and was itself called "the Anglo-Saxon hegemony". In Alfred the Great's time, his kingdom of Wessex had the hegemony (leadership) of this loose coalition.

Increasingly, it is to be heard used to mean more simply 'power'. It has been adopted by some feminists, for example, to label the oppression imposed on women by men, because of their perceived power: "My daughter accuses me of being part of the patriarchal hegemony." AWE is not sure that it approves of this usage.... or the current author is not sure that he is amused by his daughter .

See also Greek G and Burchfield's Greek g.