Proxy Meaning: When Someone or Something Stands In

Proxy meaning, sense by sense

Every proxy definition shares one idea, standing in with permission or by design, but the details shift with the setting.

1. A person authorized to act for another, most often to vote. She named her brother as her proxy.
2. The authority or document that grants that power. He signed a proxy before leaving town.
3. A stand-in measure. Something used to judge a thing that is hard to observe directly. Tree rings are a proxy for past rainfall.
4. A proxy server. A computer that sits between your device and the internet and passes requests along for you.
5. In Indian campus slang, answering attendance for an absent student. Give my proxy in the first lecture. Colleges see it as cheating, and many penalize it.

Proxy voting, step by step

Proxy voting is common in company meetings, clubs, housing societies and some elections.

Listed companies send investors documents about the issues up for a vote, and in the US the main one is called a proxy statement. A proxy fight is when rival groups compete to collect enough proxies to win control of a board. Rules on who can be a proxy, and what they may do at the meeting, differ by country and organization.

Examples in sentences

• Unable to attend, the retired teacher voted by proxy at the club's annual meeting.
• Economists sometimes use night-time satellite light as a proxy for economic activity.
• The office network blocks some sites unless you connect through the company proxy.
• Critics described the border conflict as a proxy war between two larger powers.
• Parents of young athletes can become proxies for their children's ambitions, cheering harder than the kids.

Proxy war, proxy measure and proxy server

Used before another noun, proxy means acting as a substitute.

• Proxy war: a conflict where larger powers support opposing sides without fighting each other directly. The term is recorded by the 1950s. Labelling a war this way is often disputed, because the local fighters have their own reasons too.
• Proxy measure or proxy variable: in research, an indirect sign of something. Ice cores and tree rings are proxies for ancient climate.
• Proxy server: it forwards your requests, can store copies of pages in a cache, filter content, or hide your address from the sites you visit.

Where proxy comes from

Proxy is a squeezed form of a longer word. In the early 1400s English had spellings such as prokecye, contracted from Anglo-French procuracie, which came from Medieval Latin procuratia and Latin procuratio, a taking care of or managing. The verb behind it, procurare, also gave us procure and procurement.

The early sense was the authority to act for someone, including a letter like a power of attorney. The earliest definition of proxy was the power itself; records show the person sense by the 1610s and the general substitute sense by the 1630s.

Proxy compared with agent, deputy and power of attorney

The phrase by proxy also works loosely: success by proxy means enjoying someone else's success as if it were yours. Browse related legal and money terms in our business and money list.