The official policy of a government, corporation, or organization. Although the term was used in the nineteenth century for the official policy of a political party—it was coined in the United States in the 1830s—it came into more general use in the mid-twentieth century, when it was applied particularly to the rigid dicta of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as to numerous other kinds of organization. Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav dissident, is quoted as saying, “The Party line is that there is no Party line” (by Fitzroy Maclean, The Heretic, 1957). Nowadays the term is used much more loosely, as in, “The college’s party line includes affirmative action in the admissions process.”