All over the world, there are politicians, senior public servants, and other people in executive positions who are fortunate to have a nice-sounding title which ends with general. Examples include the near ubiquitous Attorney-General, the Governor-General, or the endangered Postmaster General.
The etymology of using general in this sense relates to the French. In this case, general is a postpositive adjective meaning it modifies the meaning of the noun before it. Because of this, the plural of Attorney-General is Attorneys-General and not the erroneous Attorney-Generals.
It is common for Commonwealth nations to add a hyphen between the noun and general. For example: Attorney-General, Auditor-General, Governor-General, Solicitor-General, Surveyor-General, etc. However, other countries tend to forgo the hyphen. For example, the United States Attorney General and Postmaster General lack the hyphen.
Additionally, it is not just officeholders who can be given the postpositive adjective of general. Consulates-General, which are diplomatic missions not situated in the capital city of a country, are not people but are offices as are Directorates-General and Inspectorates-General. It can be safely assumed that the person heading the Consulate-General is the Consul-General with a Director-General and Inspector-General managing the other two.
Since we could not find a list of all of the office titles with -general in its name, we made it ourselves with Wikipedia being our main source! We try to leave sources along with some cursory information to help identify them.
This list will be updated depending on whatever we find on the internet.
Enjoy!
Google Sheets link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Gj25HgpBVBZt06RlV3UZ6JXLrrT4LSF9Qt7UIhSUcv4/edit?usp=sharing
For fun, we've made a list of fictitious -General which we made ourselves (usually as a joke): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c3T0rM1rlYIYxwWovln1PbRJY3WXMtXY9ixJU40x5v4/edit?usp=sharing
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