Word.ws English Dictionary

metayer

metayer noun: one who cultivates land for a share (usually half) of its yield, receiving stock, tools, and seed from the landlord.

Noun

metayer (plural metayers)

  1. (French and Italian agriculture) One who cultivates land for a share (usually half) of its yield, receiving stock, tools, and seed from the landlord.
    • The metayer furnishes his labour, his ignorance, and his good appetite; the proprietor supplying an exhausted soil[…]1829, The Foreign Quarterly Review, volume 4
    • A majority of the properties are so small as not to afford a subsistence to the proprietors, of whom, according to some computations, as many as three millions are obliged to eke out their means of support either by working for hire, or by taking additional land, generally on metayer tenure.1848, John Stuart Mill, “Continuation of the Same Subject [Of Peasant Proprietors]”, in Principles of Political Economy: With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. […], volume I, London...

Proper noun capitalized: Metayer

Metayer (plural Metayers)

  1. A surname.

metayer meaning in Tamil

metayer in Tamil

பாட்டக்காரர்

Forms of metayer

Noun
pluralmetayers
Proper noun
pluralMetayers

Origin of metayer

Borrowed from French métayer.

Questions about metayer

What does metayer mean?
Metayer means one who cultivates land for a share (usually half) of its yield, receiving stock, tools, and seed from the landlord.
What is metayer in Tamil?
Metayer in Tamil is பாட்டக்காரர். See Metayer meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is metayer?
Metayer can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of metayer?
The plural of metayer is metayers.

Words near metayer in the dictionary

  1. metaxylene
  2. metaxylenes
  3. metaxylohydroquinone
  4. metaxylohydroquinones
  5. metayage
  6. metayer
  7. metayers
  8. metazachlor
  9. metazellerite
  10. metazeunerite
  11. metazincin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: metayer (page history and authors); Metayer (page history and authors); metayer (Tamil Wiktionary) (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: “metayer.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/metayer. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.