Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use peasantry in a sentence

13 example sentences · noun

Peasantry means impoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands. Example: “She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks.”

Examples of peasantry by meaning

nounImpoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.

  • She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks.1920, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 3, in Main Street

More sentences with peasantry

  • Nor was the peasantry a broken reed in terms of demand for manufactured products.2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 543. From the entry broken reed
  • The Brueghelian world of the peasantry was attacked for its promotion of licentiousness, drunkenness, laziness, and ungodliness.1977, David Levine, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism, Academic Press, →ISBN, page 130. From the entry Brueghelian
  • There's a storm blowing up, Sylvester—a 'whopper', speaking in the vernacular of the peasantry.1939, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf, The Wizard of Oz. From the entry whopper
  • But the peasantry, the preponderant class in czarist Russia, still lived under the boot heel of patriarchal semi-feudalism.2004 July 8, Leslie Feinberg, “Gender & sexuality in czarist Russia”, in Workers World. From the entry under the bootheel of
  • The demands of the peasantry fall into two classes, the basic and unanimous demands and those which are subsidiary or ununanimous.1968, International Socialist Review, volume 8, page 195. From the entry ununanimous
  • The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small business-man is diminishing in numbers.1941, George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, Pt. I. From the entry capitalism
  • The chief thing which they point out to me is that there was no religious sense in the peasantry at all.1924, Maurice Hewlett, Last Essays, page 113. From the entry augmentive
  • It was then that Mao Tse-tung, who had his roots in rural central China, proclaimed that Chinese Communism must be based on the peasantry.2007, Leonard C. Meeker, Philosophy and Politics, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 255. From the entry Hu Nan
  • During the early Reconquista, the military functions of castle lords were paramount, and favoured the growth of a powerful landed aristocracy supported by the toil of an enserfed peasantry.2011, Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms, Penguin, published 2012, page 173. From the entry enserfed
  • These institutions of self-government in the Polish countryside, initially designed to empower the peasantry at the expense of the manors, were gradually transformed into instruments of the ruling bureaucracy.1995, Robert E[dward] Blobaum, “[Russian State, Polish Society] The Impact of Agrarian Reform”, in Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907…. From the entry gmina
  • Thus his analysis underscores, once again, the “availability” of both peasantry and semiproletarianized workers (self-evidently the dividing line is not a clean one) for revolutionary purposes.1985, John S. Saul, chapter I, in John S. Saul, editor, A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique, New York: Monthly…. From the entry semiproletarianized
  • All this would tend to make a free life on the ocean wave more tempting to the lotless sons of the peasantry than a toilsome existence ashore.1972, Vilhelm Moberg, History of the Swedish people, page 61. From the entry lotless

Meaning of peasantry

  1. noun Impoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.
  2. noun Ignorant people of the lowest social status; bumpkins, rustics.
  3. noun The condition of being a peasant; the position, rank, conduct, or quality of a peasant.

Full definition of peasantry

Questions about peasantry in a sentence

How do you use peasantry in a sentence?
Peasantry is used as a noun. For example: “She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks.”
What is a short sentence with peasantry?
“Nor was the peasantry a broken reed in terms of demand for manufactured products.”
What does peasantry mean?
Peasantry means impoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: peasantry (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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