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peasant
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
peasant
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a peasant revolt (=by people who work on farms)
▪ This was the best-known peasant revolt in Soviet history.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
landless
▪ For illiterate and landless serfs and peasants the language of their landlord made little difference to their lives.
▪ No landless peasants or laid-off workers are using their meager savings to buy sophisticated guns and enter into a career of crime.
local
▪ He demanded the confiscation of all private estates, the nationalization of the land, and its management by local peasant soviets.
▪ It was a Sunday, and the hotel was packed, when 94 local peasants invaded and occupied the hotel.
▪ The local peasant press was in a lamentable condition still.
▪ A lot of the stone went to build houses for the local peasants, who apparently had a tough time.
▪ In the villages the peasant committees consisted entirely of local peasants.
▪ He was beheaded by local peasants as he lay down on the hill to sleep after a large meal of local sheep.
old
▪ Niyonzima, a 40-year old peasant farmer, is about to become the first local tried for crimes against humanity.
▪ The old peasant was demonic in her rage.
▪ An old peasant woman finds the babies, cares for them, and begins searching for the true parents.
▪ There he stands crooked, pushed forwards with the chair legs sticking out behind, like an old peasant woman carrying firewood.
poor
▪ Far from being desperately poor peasants, the squatters were clearly city dwellers.
▪ The poorest peasant, in like case, would suffer no more.
▪ Though officials sometimes mentioned that poor peasants owned cattle, ownership was often concentrated and cattle usually had to be hired.
▪ Similarly, the silk-wearing bourgeoisie of Granada contrasted with the poor, cotton-clad peasants from the mountains nearby.
▪ Here investment, the use of hired labour, the differentiation between richer and poorer peasants, made minimal progress.
▪ The simplicity of the sect attracted thousands of poor peasants.
▪ Especially those of the poor workers and peasants.
▪ Almost all, except the poor peasant occupiers, were indicted as reactionary landlords.
rich
▪ It began with the Agrarian Law of 30 June 1950, which ruthlessly ousted landed proprietors and rich peasants.
▪ Landlords and rich peasants were identified as the enemy and their power broken.
▪ Mixed farming, peasant agriculture, especially that of commercially-minded rich peasants, could flourish in such situations.
▪ Here investment, the use of hired labour, the differentiation between richer and poorer peasants, made minimal progress.
▪ To this extent the region was actually encouraging the formation of richer peasant strata at the expense of the poorer.
▪ Memories obviously lingered of the War Communism strategy of trying to divide richer from poorer peasants.
▪ Many soon found themselves in long-term debt to richer peasants, particularly in the Famine areas.
small
▪ More than half the small peasant farms are squeezed on to just 16 percent of the land.
▪ Legally dispossessed, the big landowners have almost everywhere recovered their advantage over the small peasants.
▪ They were predominantly small peasant economies, with scarcely any industry.
■ NOUN
commune
▪ Above all he sought to dismantle the traditional peasant commune.
▪ At its centre stood the peasant commune, they believed, had preserved the peasantry from the corruption of private property.
▪ During the 1860s and 70s the populists attributed to the primitive peasant commune all the characteristics of a latent socialist order.
▪ Chicherin stopped writing private memoranda and started a debate on the peasant commune.
community
▪ Among the civilian victims have been members of peasant communities and rural cooperatives who refused to join or support Sendero Luminoso.
▪ It encouraged the incorporation of the peasant community into the wider society, because it operated through the market.
▪ Most of the victims have come from towns and isolated peasant communities in remote rural areas.
economy
▪ The peasant economy provides a reserve of cheap labour for capitalism and so contributes to capital accumulation.
▪ Such critical features of the peasant economy as horse-ownership showed a disastrous drop during the late nineteenth century.
▪ They were predominantly small peasant economies, with scarcely any industry.
▪ The polyptych evidence shows that the peasant economy was well able to sustain these royal demands.
family
▪ The resettlement programme for peasant families lags far behind its targets.
▪ The experience of peasant families was repeated by sending daughters into similar social situations in domestic service and piecework.
▪ Inequalities between patron and client, peasant families and land-owning families and men and women, therefore, continue.
▪ He came from a peasant family and was born near the city of Pyongyang in 1912.
▪ An assignment to cover a strange event in a peasant family changes her life.
farmer
▪ Part is earmarked for transfer to the impoverished peasant farmers living in the areas concerned.
▪ Niyonzima, a 40-year old peasant farmer, is about to become the first local tried for crimes against humanity.
▪ In the strict hierarchy of the Catalan countryside these peasant farmer families almost ranked as a petty nobility.
▪ Last June, a force of state police killed 17 unarmed peasant farmers on their way to a protest rally.
▪ Mrs Villemin is the wife of a peasant farmer.
▪ Growers -- mostly peasant farmers -- planted agave in the late 1980s, then waited seven years for their crop to mature.
▪ This depended on the creation of a large body of enterprising peasant farmers growing essentially cash crops.
▪ I also visited a cooperative of peasant farmers who grow sesame seed.
girl
▪ As he restarted the record, the door of the room opened and a young Annamese peasant girl entered.
▪ But when they first meet, as children, she is a destitute peasant girl called Firecrackers.
▪ I looked like one of those peasant girls in the old folk-tales, the ones who never get to the ball.
▪ She and Sister Colleta are both about four feet eleven and probably they are peasant girls from villages.
▪ The Plot An orphaned peasant girl was given a home by a kindly old woman who could not see very well.
rebellion
▪ Mindful, perhaps, of the events of 1801 and 1825, he feared aristocratic recalcitrance more than a peasant rebellion.
▪ One of those writs last used in peasant rebellions in the 1400s.
▪ His master explanatory variable is market capitalism and his dependent variable is peasant rebellion.
revolt
▪ This was the best-known and recorded peasant revolt in Soviet history, yet its practical achievements were nil.
society
▪ It is in peasant society that one sees some of the main gainers from the surplus of land.
▪ Nor could peasant society be kept unchanged over 250 years.
▪ The most important and uncontrollable factor in this peasant society occurs then in a woman's body.
▪ In a peasant society, these are the significant moments of human life and the main phases and aspects of agriculture.
▪ In some other respects it relied on centuries of evolution of peasant society.
woman
▪ By travelling with him we are reversing the process adopted with our peasant woman in the Smolensk guberniia.
▪ An old peasant woman finds the babies, cares for them, and begins searching for the true parents.
▪ She argues that the diplomatic wife is as much a victim of male-dominated foreign policy as the peasant woman farmer.
▪ Over a period of just months I was witness to the rapid transformation of a group of peasant women into industrial workers.
▪ If you can find a gnarled peasant woman making shabby artefacts from twigs, point your readers in her direction.
▪ If Goethe could live with a peasant woman, then I could marry Sonya.
▪ There he stands crooked, pushed forwards with the chair legs sticking out behind, like an old peasant woman carrying firewood.
■ VERB
lead
▪ Moreover in many areas the assault upon the nobility was led by middle peasants whose family farms were anything but capitalist.
▪ They bypassed the Stalinists and led the peasants and workers to the establishment of a workers state.
▪ Listen: there go the goats, the faint arrhythmia of the bells on their collars, led by the white-clad peasant.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ The economic crisis caused famine, epidemics, and peasant revolt.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ In response peasants cultivate bulkier but less nutritious crops, such as cassava.
▪ It had no fiefs to be the subject of investiture, no peasant tenure, no peasant serfs.
▪ Lords and peasants shared attitudes and beliefs.
▪ Moreover, in the absence of any evidence of impending upheaval, individual peasants were wary of risking involvement in seditious talk.
▪ Some of the wealthier peasants would probably have held some enclosed freehold fields.
▪ The government asked them, like the peasants, to make superhuman efforts.
▪ Topics will include land problems, development projects, health and education, women's groups, peasant cooperatives and democratic congresses.
▪ Would not Gandhi come to hear their grievances? the peasant asked.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Peasant

Peasant \Peas"ant\, n. [OF. pa["i]sant (the i being perh. due to confusion with the p. pr. of verbs), pa["i]san, F. paysan, fr. OF. & F. pays country, fr. L. pagus the country. See Pagan.] A countryman; a rustic; especially, one of the lowest class of tillers of the soil in European countries.

Syn: Countryman; rustic; swain; hind.

Peasant

Peasant \Peas"ant\, a. Rustic, rural.
--Spenser.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
peasant

early 15c., from Anglo-French paisant (mid-14c.), Old French paisent "local inhabitant" (12c., Modern French paysan), earlier paisenc, from pais "country, region" + Frankish suffix -enc "-ing."\n

\nPais is from Late Latin pagensis "(inhabitant) of the district," from Latin pagus "country or rural district" (see pagan). As a style of garment in fashion (such as peasant blouse) from 1953.

Wiktionary
peasant

n. 1 A member of the lowly social class which toils on the land, constituted by small farmers and tenants, sharecroppers, farmhands and other laborers on the land where they form the main labor force in agriculture and horticulture. 2 A country person. 3 An uncouth, crude or ill-bred person. 4 (''strategy games'') a worker unit

Related phrases:
WordNet
peasant

  1. n. a country person [syn: provincial, bucolic]

  2. one of a (chiefly European) class of agricultural laborers

  3. a crude uncouth ill-bred person lacking culture or refinement [syn: barbarian, boor, churl, Goth, tyke, tike]

Wikipedia
Peasant

A peasant is a member of a traditional class of farmers, either laborers or owners of small farms, especially in the Middle Ages under feudalism, or more generally, in any pre-industrial society. In Europe, peasants were divided into three classes according to their personal status: slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants either hold title to land in fee simple, or hold land by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.

The word "peasant" is—and long has been—often used pejoratively to refer to poor or landless farmers and agricultural workers, especially in the poorer countries of the world in which the agricultural labor force makes up a large percentage of the population. The implication of the term is that the "peasant" is uneducated, ignorant, and unfamiliar with the more sophisticated mannerisms of the urban population.

The word "peasant" is also commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and under-developed countries of the world.

Peasant (artist)

Peasant was the stage name of Damien DeRose (September 23, 1985 - November 18, 2015), an American songwriter, singer, and producer. Described by media as a more optimistic version of Elliott Smith, Peasant toured extensively in both Europe and the US, sharing the stage with acts such as Cursive, Dr. Dog, Horse Feathers, Dan Mangan, Delta Spirit, Rocky Votolato, Sharon Van Etten, Chris Pureka, Hop Along, Illinois, Albert Hammond, Jr., Liz Green and many others.

Peasant (disambiguation)

Peasant can refer to:

  • Peasant, a traditional class of farmers
  • Peasants (film), South Korean film
  • Ashigaru, Japanese peasant foot soldiers
  • HD 172910, the single-star Chinese asterism the Peasant
  • Peasant (artist) (1985–2015), musician from Doylestown, PA
  • Peasant, an album by American band Thou

Usage examples of "peasant".

The infantry was a half-armed, spiritless crowd of peasants, levied in haste by the allurements of plunder, and as easily dispersed by a victory as by a defeat.

Janice, camouflaging her mood in a gay and festive ruffly-sleeved peasant blouse and evening skirt with flower applique, was in the kitchen.

Anyone could apply for an apprenticeship and stand a reasonable chance of being accepted, virtually every apprentice became a wizard, and all wizards were accepted as equals, regardless of whether they had been born to princes, peasants, or even other wizards.

Pierre told them, joyfully, of attacks on the Cabora Bassa dam on the Zambezi which had delayed that project of exploitation for so many years, upping the ante intolerably for that tiny peasant empire Portugal.

In the evening, the Count, with all his family, except the Countess and Mademoiselle Bearn, went to the woods to witness the festivity of the peasants.

Within the space of minutes, she glimpsed beggars, peasant labourers, tradesmen and shopkeepers, market women and grisettes, students, liveried servants and footmen, assorted soberly clad bourgeois, sailors, uniformed gendarmes, Royal Guardsmen and shabbily bedizened females who could only have been prostitutes, mingling freely in the streets.

Lefevre was a country dame, a widow, one of these half peasants, with ribbons and bonnets with trimming on them, one of those persons who clipped her words and put on great airs in public, concealing the soul of a pretentious animal beneath a comical and bedizened exterior, just as the country-folks hide their coarse red hands in ecru silk gloves.

Could I possibly have supposed that the peasant would have brought me amongst those accursed enemies of humankind!

The peasant woman returned, laid the table for two, and brought us our supper.

The thin margin of their prosperity and the absurdity of calling them exploiters was revealed in Soviet census data examined by Richard Pipes, showing that only 2 percent of peasant households had any hired help, and these averaged one employee each.

The spirit of conquest, and even of enthusiasm, was extinct: the Saracens could no longer struggle, beyond their lines, either single or in small parties, without exposing themselves to the merciless retaliation of the Thracian peasants.

His companion was by now getting used to thinking of herself as a girl and being thought of as such by this educated gentleman of a rough peasant who treated lads and lasses the same except for an extra degree of mannerliness to the latter and a degree less of badinage and freedom with his language, both of which slipped when he forgot about them.

Prim women wearing mantalets drew near peasants in panchos as their hero rode near.

Here, too, were the fierce men from the Mendips, the wild hunters from Porlock Quay and Minehead, the poachers of Exmoor, the shaggy marshmen of Axbridge, the mountain men from the Quantocks, the serge and wool-workers of Devonshire, the graziers of Bampton, the red-coats from the Militia, the stout burghers of Taunton, and then, as the very bone and sinew of all, the brave smockfrocked peasants of the plains, who had turned up their jackets to the elbow, and exposed their brown and corded arms, as was their wont when good work had to be done.

Du Peyrou de Cheyssiole and Bonhoure speak of an aged peasant woman, past ninety-one years of age, who menstruated regularly.