Major

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This article is about the military rank. For other uses, see Major (disambiguation).

Common Military Ranks
Naval Forces	Land/Air Forces	Commonwealth Air Forces
Admiral	General	Air Marshal
Commodore	Brigadier	Air Commodore
Captain	Colonel	Group Captain
Commander	Lieutenant Colonel	Wing Commander
Lieutenant Commander	Major	Squadron Leader
Lieutenant	Captain	Flight Lieutenant
Sub-Lieutenant	Lieutenant	Flying Officer
Warrant Officer	Warrant Officer	Warrant Officer
Petty Officer	Sergeant	Sergeant
Leading Rate	Corporal	Corporal
Seaman	Private	Aircraftman

Major is a military rank the use of which varies according to country.

Major frequently denotes an officer of mid-level command status (usually immediately superior to the rank of Captain and immediately subordinate to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel).

However in some armies major is essentially a senior NCO. This usage derives from "sergeant-major".

1 Early history
2 Officer rank
3 Non-commissioned rank
4 Use as a suffix
5 Links to Major ranks by country
6 Links to ranks equivalent to Major by country
7 See also
8 Sources and references

[edit] Early history

In considering terms of rank it is important to realize that the early evolution of the terms was often outside of English, and that the terminology has always been in essentially international distribution. The rank of Major originates in general European usage from Romance comparative adjectives with the sense of Latin maior (also spelled major) 'senior, greater'. Historically all Majors, Sergeant Majors, and Major Generals (to use English forms) derive from the rank or rather office of Sergeant Major. The Sergeant Major was the individual responsible for marshalling a battalion of pike. He was presumably the senior Company Sergeant from among the companies providing the pikemen, or at least a commissioned officer considered analogous to such a person. Major is a shortened version of Sergeant Major: the (Sergeant) Major 'the senior sergeant'. This is obscured in French and English by the later evolution of a separate non-comissioned rank called sergent major or Sergeant Major. Similarly the rank of Major General is truncated from original Sergeant Major General 'the sergeant major or sergeant major-like individual with general authority over the marshalling of the whole army'. Originally there was a single Sergeant Major General in each major field force.

The original usage is illustrated in the first recorded (?) English (1643) attestation, as "Sergeant-Major", 'the third-in-command of a regiment'. The early German equivalent was Feld Wachtmeister, in which Feld functions as major and Wachtmeister ('watch master' or 'quarter(ing) master') is more commonly used as the term for a cavalry sergeant. Similarly we find Spanish Majors referred to early on as Sarjento Major.

In several European navies, the rank of Major was used in the sense or form "Pilot-Major" to denote the senior deck officer of a vessel in contrast to the Captain (or Captain General) who was typically an Army officer, with little naval knowledge, assigned to command the mission on which a vessel was embarked. The English equivalent of this usage is [[Master], as opposed to theCaptain or Commander.

[edit] Officer rank

In most comparative military scales a Major is ranked as a "Level 4" (O-4) officer although some systems (among them the NATO rank codes) list a Major as a Level 3. The naval equivalent to a Major is, in some nations, the rank of Lieutenant Commander.

By the time of the English Civil War, Major had become its own rank and was assigned to mid-level officers on the battlefield and was most often used by those who served as aides to a superior General.

The rank of Major General arose during the 18th century, and was a shortening of the rank Sergeant Major General.

By the 19th century, the rank of Major was being used by nearly every English-speaking military, as well as some others. It quickly developed into a senior staff position and was seen as the first of the "command" or "field" ranks, in contrast to the rank of Captain and below which were viewed as "company ranks".

[edit] Non-commissioned rank

In the French military, a major is the most senior non-commissioned rank. This rank can only be awarded by senior NCO (adjudants-chefs), after a very selective exam. Officially it is not a non-commissioned rank, but an intermediate rank between non-commissioned and commissioned.

[edit] Use as a suffix

The rank of Major may still be found in its original form as a suffix (with or without a hyphen), to denote an officer more senior to the base rank. As a suffix major derives from a comparative adjective major 'greater, senior' following the modified noun in Romance languages.

Examples as the ranks of Adjutant-Major, and Colonel-Major. It is also still commonly used in the rank of Sergeant Major, and is also used in ceremonial appointments such as Drum-Major and Pipe-Major.

In Argentina, the armed forces all use the rank of sub-officer-major as the highest non-commissioned rank. The army and air force also use the officer rank of major. The army has a rank of colonel-major, but this is essentially an automatic promotion for long-serving colonels rather than a functional rank in its own right. The Argentine National Gendarmerie uses the rank of commandant-major, which is roughly equivalent to a colonel or chief superintendent in the commonwealth.

It is similarly still used as a prefix for the General officer rank of Major-General, which is similarly used in many other languages (e.g. Generaal-Majoor in Dutch).