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A ministry of foreign affairs of a major power. This was the meaning of this word when it was used before the First World War in the phrase ‘the Chancelleries of Europe’.
The political section of a diplomatic mission. This was the sense in which it was sometimes used in the US Foreign Service until the 1960s, though the British usually insisted that this was wrong, not least because it caused confusion with the first meaning of ‘chancellery’. The proper term here, they felt, was chancery. This was a fair point. In their defence, however, the Americans, who tended to use ‘chancellery’ and ‘chancery’ interchangeably, could have called in the Oxford English Dictionary, which points out that ‘chancery’ is simply a ‘worn down version’ of ‘chancellery’. |
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