Crossword clues for peon
peon
- Field worker
- Unskilled worker
- Feudal drudge
- Feudal serf, e.g
- Agricultural worker
- Lowly assistant
- Office drudge
- McJob holder
- Low-level laborer
- Little worker
- Hacienda drudge
- Latin American laborer
- Working drudge
- One doing hard labor
- Indentured servant
- Day laborer
- Wage slave
- Rancho hand
- Office drone
- Mexican slave, e.g
- Menial toiler
- Lowly farmhand
- Low man on the totem pole
- Low laborer
- Laborer doing menial work
- He's a nobody
- Worker south of the border
- Unskilled working stiff
- Unskilled farm laborer
- Unpaid intern, jocularly
- Unenviable hand
- Underappreciated laborer
- Under hand?
- The Mexican peasant
- Subservient servant
- Spanish worker
- Spanish word for the pawn in chess
- Sonora laborer
- Servant or serf relative
- Person of no significance
- One doing menial work
- Office underling
- Mere drudge
- Menial employee
- McJob worker
- McJob performer
- McJob doer
- Many a cube farm worker
- Lowly type
- Lowly toiler
- Lowly chess piece, in Spain
- Literally everybody at the office beneath me
- Indian messenger
- Indebted laborer
- Hacienda hand
- Exploited field worker
- Drudgery doer
- Barely paid labor
- Drudge of old
- Exploited worker
- Lowly worker
- Menial worker
- Working stiff
- Lowly laborer
- Menial laborer
- V.I.P.'s opposite
- Hacienda hand, maybe
- ...
- Dogsbody, so to speak
- Low hand?
- Nobody
- Unskilled laborer
- Underhand?
- Lowly sort
- Unappreciated worker
- Low jack?
- McJob doer, e.g
- Grunt
- Lowly one
- Cog, so to speak
- Drone
- Worker hardly making a living wage
- Common laborer
- A laborer who is obliged to do menial work
- Mexican laborer
- Laborer in Latin America
- Latin laborer
- Indian foot soldier
- Foot soldier in India
- Chess pawn, in Cádiz
- Hacienda hand, perhaps
- Mexican muzhik
- Taxco toiler
- Mexican worker
- Calcutta cop
- Exploited laborer
- Mighty boss's opposite
- Working class member
- Laborer south of the border
- Peasant worker
- Low-skilled worker
- Mexican day laborer
- Drudge, in Honduras
- Low-paid laborer
- León laborer
- Tampico toiler
- Fiesta lover
- Rancho worker
- Serf's kin
- Mexican hand
- He toils much for little
- Bullfighter's attendant
- Spanish esne
- Oaxaca laborer
- Latin American farm labourer
- Poor person and working class in school at the top
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Poon \Poon\, n. [Canarese ponne.] A name for several East Indian, or their wood, used for the masts and spars of vessels, as Calophyllum angustifolium, Calophyllum inophullum, and Sterculia f[oe]tida; -- called also peon.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
unskilled worker, 1826, from Mexican Spanish peon "agricultural laborer" (especially a debtor held in servitude by his creditor), from Spanish peon "day laborer," also "pedestrian," originally "foot soldier," from Medieval Latin pedonem "foot soldier" (see pawn (n.2)). The word entered British English earlier (c.1600) in the sense "native constable, soldier, or messenger in India," via Portuguese peao "pedestrian, foot soldier, day laborer."
Wiktionary
n. A lowly person, a peasant or serf, a labourer who is obliged to do menial work
WordNet
n. a laborer who is obliged to do menial work [syn: drudge, navvy, galley slave]
Wikipedia
A peon is a person subject to peonage (, from Spanish peón ), a type of involuntary servitude of laborers (peons) having little control over their employment conditions. Peonage existed historically during the colonial period, especially in Latin America and areas of Spanish rule.
A (figurative) peon (reflecting the former institution of peonage and modern analogs of it) is a person with little authority, often assigned unskilled tasks, or an underling or any person subjected to capricious or unreasonable oversight. In this sense, peon is often used in either a derogatory or self-effacing context.
- American English: in a historical and legal sense, peon generally referred to someone working in an unfree labor system (known as peonage). The word often implied debt bondage and/or indentured servitude.
There are other usages in contemporary cultures:
- English language varieties spoken in South Asian countries: a peon is an office boy, an attendant, or an orderly, a person kept around for odd jobs (and, historically, a policeman or foot soldier). (In an unrelated South Asian sense, "peon" may also be an alternative spelling for the poon tree (genus Calophyllum) or its wood, especially when used in boat-building.)
- Shanghai: among native Chinese working in firms where English is spoken, the word has been phonetically reinterpreted as "pee-on" (referencing the purported figurative origin of the term ), and refers to a worker with little authority, who suffers indignities from superiors.
- Computing slang: a peon is an "unprivileged user"—a person without special privileges on a computer system (compare luser) The other extreme is " superuser" (compare systems administrator).
- Financial trading slang: a peon is a market participant who trades in small quantities or a small account.
Usage examples of "peon".
She bribed the peons to help her, she might have got the information out of them.
Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.
The CATAPEZ, as he was called in Chilian, had two natives called PEONS, and a boy about twelve years of age under him.
He shall escort your diligencia right into Sulaco with some of our railway peons.
Jadine wanted to laugh out loud at the notion of her living like a peon, with a stairstep of children clinging to her skirts while Juan sat in the shade of a tree with his friends drinking from a jug of mescal.
So the bootleggers get one of their peons to get rid of the rest of it.
Often some capricious winding would bring the column in two parallel lines, and the CATAPEZ could speak to his PEONS across a crevasse not two fathoms wide, though two hundred deep, which made between them an inseparable gulf.
The cacique does not wish his laborers to acquire land in their own right, for he well knows that if they did so they would become self-supporting, and it would cease to be possible for him to hold them as peons, as is commonly done at present.
Taft, laboured to frame a set of laws under which we might hope by faith and patience, by justice and hard work, to raise wild men and primitive peons to the level of a sound and enlightened people.
Though unlicensed, he could steal and lay his own plumbing, do all the electric fixtures in a house, and hire five peons at slave wages to install a septic tank that would not overflow until the day after Joe died or left town.
Segura's peones were running the bull, dragging their capes behind them, letting the animal chase them to the burladero shelters.
When Blanquet, who was the greatest peon de brega who ever lived, worked under the orders of Granero he told me that on the day of Manolo Granero’s death, when they stopped in the chapel on the way to the ring, the odor of death was so strong on Manolo that it almost made Blanquet sick.
The Vagabonds, criollos, the mountain-dwelling Indian peons, the desperadoes from the mining-country up north, these were only permitted to gather in the City on certain occasions, and an auto da fé was one of them.
A young Santo Domingan is born into life as a peon, engineer, artisan, or soldier.
The man looked exactly as startled as Earle felt: just how friendly would an amazon get with a peon, even in illusion?