Word of the Day:
peasantry
What It Means
Impoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.
Ignorant people of the lowest social status; bumpkins, rustics.
The condition of being a peasant; the position, rank, conduct, or quality of a peasant.
Peasantry in Context
“They distressed her. They were so stolid. 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. But the older people, Yankees as...”
Did You Know?
From peasant + -ry, from Middle English paissaunt.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: peasantry (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “peasantry.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/peasantry. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
