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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
servitude
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
penal
▪ He was on the Sûreté list and was arrested in November 1930 and sentenced to 12 years penal servitude in September 1931.
▪ Justice Day sentenced them both to 20 years' penal servitude.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
penal servitude
▪ He was on the Sûreté list and was arrested in November 1930 and sentenced to 12 years penal servitude in September 1931.
▪ Justice Day sentenced them both to 20 years' penal servitude.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ The 13th Amendment forbade slavery and involuntary servitude.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Both his economic independence and his essential servitude were thus, at the same time, guaranteed.
▪ During his servitude Apollo made friends with the household, especially with the head of it and his wife Alcestis.
▪ Human servitude will disappear, for servitors in the form of machines, powered by steam and electricity, will take over.
▪ Justice Day sentenced them both to 20 years' penal servitude.
▪ Many of the most apparently distinguished honours are a reward for little more than longevity or political servitude.
▪ Passing an amendment to end slavery and actually banishing involuntary servitude are two different things.
▪ Sheldukher, absorbed in his map, seemed not to have noticed its newly acquired air of placid servitude.
▪ Those who chose servitude changed to do so.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Servitude

Servitude \Serv"i*tude\, n. [L. servitudo: cf. F. servitude.]

  1. The state of voluntary or compulsory subjection to a master; the condition of being bound to service; the condition of a slave; slavery; bondage; hence, a state of slavish dependence.

    You would have sold your king to slaughter, His princes and his peers to servitude.
    --Shak.

    A splendid servitude; . . . for he that rises up early, and goes to bed late, only to receive addresses, is really as much abridged in his freedom as he that waits to present one.
    --South.

  2. Servants, collectively. [Obs.]

    After him a cumbrous train Of herds and flocks, and numerous servitude.
    --Milton.

  3. (Law) A right whereby one thing is subject to another thing or person for use or convenience, contrary to the common right.

    Note: The object of a servitude is either to suffer something to be done by another, or to omit to do something, with respect to a thing. The easements of the English correspond in some respects with the servitudes of the Roman law. Both terms are used by common law writers, and often indiscriminately. The former, however, rather indicates the right enjoyed, and the latter the burden imposed.
    --Ayliffe. Erskine. E. Washburn.

    Penal servitude. See under Penal.

    Personal servitude (Law), that which arises when the use of a thing is granted as a real right to a particular individual other than the proprietor.

    Predial servitude (Law), that which one estate owes to another estate. When it related to lands, vineyards, gardens, or the like, it is called rural; when it related to houses and buildings, it is called urban.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
servitude

early 15c., "condition of being enslaved," from Old French servitude, servitute (13c.) and directly from Late Latin servitudo "slavery," from Latin servus "a slave" (see serve (v.)) + abstract noun suffix.

Wiktionary
servitude

n. 1 The state of being a slave; slavery. 2 (context legal English) A qualified beneficial interest severed or fragmented from the ownership of an inferior property and attached to a superior property or to some person other than the owner.

WordNet
servitude

n. state of subjection to an owner or master or forced labor imposed as punishment; "penal servitude"

Wikipedia
Servitude (BDSM)

In BDSM, servitude refers to performing personal tasks for their dominant partner, as part of their submissive role in a BDSM relationship.

In domestic servitude roles, the submissive can receive pleasure and satisfaction from performing personal services for their dominant, such as serving as a butler, waitress, chauffeur, maid or houseboy.

In workplace BDSM, the submissive can somehow secretly contrive that a work colleague, of the same or opposite gender to the submissive, unwittingly finds themselves with imagined or real work-related disciplinary power and/or status over the submissive. The created dominant may never realise they are bringing secret pleasure and satisfaction to the submissive, in the giving of orders or else in rebuking the submissive for supposed performance failings at the workplace, such as "laziness".

The satisfaction of servitude are often combined with the pleasures of fetishes, the pleasures of humiliation, or both. A submissive may rub his or her dominant's feet because the sub enjoys providing the service, has a foot fetish, enjoys being "lower" than the dominant, or any combination. But some bottoms who enjoy servitude prefer to keep their enjoyment and pleasure secret from all others including person(s) they have created as their "dominant". There are those in the BDSM community who frown upon this practice, however, as surreptitiously putting someone in a dominant position violates the principle of consent.

In other situations, the submissive may also enjoy being collared and leashed, and in some aspects being treated like an animal. Leashes can also be attached to piercings.

Servitude

Servitude may refer to:

Usage examples of "servitude".

Gothic standard became the refuge of forty thousand Barbarian slaves, who had broke their chains, and aspired, under the command of their great deliverer, to revenge the injuries and the disgrace of their cruel servitude.

Wilson, whose term of servitude had expired, preferred the mode of living among the natives, to earning his livelihood by the sweat of his brow.

This reconstruction measure was an attempt to put the superior part of the community under the control of the inferior, these parts separated by all the prejudices of race, and by traditions of mastership on the one side and of servitude on the other.

Thus it is that whatsoever be their utterance, whether it pertain to the realm of Divinity, Lordship, Prophethood, Messengership, Guardianship, Apostelship or Servitude, all is true, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Besieged by solicitations for products and services we neither want nor need, misrepresented and misgoverned by corrupt politicians beholden to multinational megacorporations, and reduced to involuntary servitude by usurious financial institutions, we are not so much consumers as we are in danger of being consumed.

It claims to be an everlasting protest against priestly tyranny, and monkish authority, and abject spiritual servitude in the laity.

Bineses, the ambassador of Persia, entered the place, displayed from the citadel the standard of the Great King, and proclaimed, in his name, the cruel alternative of exile or servitude.

Christian bishops, on whose aid he relied for subduing the temporal princes, saw that he was determined to reduce them to servitude, and, by assuming the whole legislative and judicial power of the church to centre all authority in the sovereign pontiff.

Such a state of society was very little advanced beyond the rude state of nature: violence universally prevailed, instead of general and equitable maxims: the pretended liberty of the times was only an incapacity of submitting to government: and men, not protected by law in their lives and properties, sought shelter, by their personal servitude and attachments, under some powerful chieftain, or by voluntary combinations.

He had contracted for 100,000 bricks, ordered specially made window frames from London, and in Philadelphia purchased the unexpired servitude of an indentured servant, a stonecutter, to do the columns.

When we contemplate these achievements of mind, by which manual labor has been diminished, and every physical force both magnified and economized, how unstatesmanlike is the view which regards a human being as a bundle of muscles and bones merely, with no destiny but ignorance, servitude, and poverty!

A wandering tribe of the Blemmyes or Nubians invaded his solitary prison: in their retreat they dismissed a crowd of useless captives: but no sooner had Nestorius reached the banks of the Nile, than he would gladly have escaped from a Roman and orthodox city, to the milder servitude of the savages.

I saw her, in the courtyard of Cereus House, the day she sold me into servitude.

The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude.

I am rather of the opinion of those who say that, on the taking of Corniculum, the wife of Servius Tullius, who had been the leading man in that city, being pregnant when her husband was slain, being known among the other female prisoners, and, in consequence of her high rank, exempted from servitude by the Roman queen, was delivered of a child at Rome, in the house of Tarquinius Priscus.