federal

Refers to the government of the country as a whole.

Word Structure

Sentence Examples

Well, this is a little tricky.

We talk about federal in the sense of the federal government.

We're talking about the government of the whole country, but there's another sense of federal and that is the federal system which in the United States means that we not only have a national government, but we have state (governments), partly independent from the national government.

A federal system is one in which the national government is composed of subunits like states that are semi autonomous not completely autonomous, but somewhat autonomous as opposed to a unitary system in which a single national government controls policy all the way throughout the country.

Semantic Relatives

Budget

Central

Executive Branch

Government

Judicial Branch

Law

Legislature

Local

National

Deeper Dive

Learn more about federal.