alpha male

Meaning

Noun

• The dominant male in a group of animals.
• A dominant, assertive, protective, oftentimes successful, leadership-type man or male.

Origin

• Originally used in scientific research of hierarchies in social animals the term is now often applied to men with dominating characteristics. Already in some use during the 1990s it was further popularized by Neil Strauss in The Game (2005).{{cite-web
• |title=How America Became Infatuated With a Cartoonish Idea of ‘Alpha Males’
• |author=Jesse Singal
• |url=http://nymag.com/betamale/2016/05/the-rise-of-the-alpha-beta-male.html
• |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20160521031818/http://nymag.com/betamale/2016/05/the-rise-of-the-alpha-beta-male.html
• |archivedate=2016-05-21
• |work=NYMag
• |date=May 18, 2016
• |passage=Over the last 20 years — but particularly since The Game’s release — a vast ecosystem of alpha-oriented online communities have popped up to teach men how to crawl out of the sad pit of their betadom.