Word.ws English Dictionary

esne

esne noun: a hireling of servile status; slave.

Noun

esne (plural esnes)

  1. (historical, Anglo-Saxon) A hireling of servile status; slave.
    • To an esne, therefore, I refer the entry in Doomsday-book, that at Chester, if a male or female slave shall do any […]1818, Samuel Heywood, A dissertation upon the distinctions in society
    • […] of British extraction captured or purchased, — or of the common German stock descended from the slaves of the first colonists: the esne or slave who works for hire; […]1875, William Stubbs, The constitutional history of England, in its origin and development

Proper noun capitalized: Esne

Esne

  1. (obsolete) Obsolete form of Esna

Forms of esne

pluralesnes

Origin of esne

Learned borrowing from Old English esne, from Proto-West Germanic *asnī, from Proto-Germanic *asnijaz (“day labourer, hireling”), from Proto-Germanic *asniz, *asunz (“reward”), from Proto-Indo-European *os(e)n-, *es(e)n- (“summer, harvest, harvest-time”). Related to Old English earnian (“to labor for, strive after, deserve as the reward of labor, merit, earn, win”). More at earn.

Questions about esne

What does esne mean?
Esne means a hireling of servile status; slave.
What part of speech is esne?
Esne can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of esne?
The plural of esne is esnes.

Words near esne in the dictionary

  1. esmolol
  2. Esmond
  3. Esmé
  4. ESN
  5. Esna
  6. esne
  7. esnecy
  8. esnes
  9. ESnet
  10. ESNs
  11. ESO

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: esne (page history and authors); Esne (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “esne.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/esne. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.