The Right Honourable
honorific prefix
The Right Honourable (abbreviation: The Rt Hon. or variations) is an honorific style traditionally applied to certain persons and collective bodies in the United Kingdom, the former British Empire, and the Commonwealth of Nations. The term is predominantly used today as a style associated with the holding of certain senior public offices in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, Australia and Nepal.
Right in this context is an adverb meaning 'very' or 'fully'. Grammatically, The Right Honourable is an adjectival phrase which gives information about a person. As such, it is not considered correct to apply it in direct address, nor to use it on its own as a title in place of a name; but rather it is used in the third person along with a name or noun to be modified.
Right may be abbreviated to Rt, and Honourable to Hon., or both. The is sometimes omitted in written abbreviated form, but is always pronounced.
Countries with common or current usage
United Kingdom
Entitlement
According to the British government, the following persons are entitled to be styled Right Honourable:
Members of the Privy Council
The Privy Council is notionally the body of formal advisers to the sovereign. Members of the Cabinet (including the Prime Minister), senior politicians, and some few other officials are appointed as members for life, and are personally entitled to be styled Right Honourable thereafter.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Right Honourable” as honorific prefix. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as honorific prefix. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1480896. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Right Honourable” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.