Word.ws English Dictionary

under-spur-leather

under-spur-leather noun: subordinate, underling.

Noun

under-spur-leather (plural under-spur-leathers)

  1. (obsolete) Subordinate, underling.
    • […] if the Officers are allow’d to impose upon them, Under-Spur-leathers are always the Tyrants; a Government regulated by Laws, and Govern’d according to such Regulations, never willingly put it into the power of any Inferiour Officer to Tyrannize over his fellow Subjects.1704, Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the Regulation of the Press, London, page 5
    • I have instructed an under-spur-leather to write so, that it is taken for mine.1711, Jonathan Swift, Letter to Esther Johnson dated 9 October, 1711, in Letters Written by the Late Jonathan Swift, London: C. Bathurst et al., 3rd edition, 1769, p. 61

Forms of under-spur-leather

pluralunder-spur-leathers

Origin of under-spur-leather

From under- + spur-leather.

Questions about under-spur-leather

What does under-spur-leather mean?
Under-spur-leather means subordinate, underling.
What part of speech is under-spur-leather?
Under-spur-leather is a noun.
What is the plural of under-spur-leather?
The plural of under-spur-leather is under-spur-leathers.

Words near under-spur-leather in the dictionary

  1. under-resourced
  2. under-ripe
  3. under-sergeant
  4. under-sergeants
  5. under-served
  6. under-spur-leather
  7. under-spur-leathers
  8. under-stander
  9. under-standers
  10. under-steward
  11. under-stewards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: under-spur-leather (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-under-spur-leather.wav.

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