What is "yeoman"

Yeoman \Yeo"man\, n.; pl. Yeomen. [OE. yoman, [yogh]eman, [yogh]oman; of uncertain origin; perhaps the first, syllable is akin to OFries. g[=a] district, region, G. gau, OHG. gewi, gouwi, Goth. gawi. [root]100.]

1. A common man, or one of the commonly of the first or most respectable class; a freeholder; a man free born.

   Note: A yeoman in England is considered as next in order to the gentry. The word is little used in the United States, unless as a title in law proceedings and instruments, designating occupation, and this only in particular States.

2. A servant; a retainer. [Obs.]

   A yeman hadde he and servants no mo.
   --Chaucer.

3. A yeoman of the guard; also, a member of the yeomanry cavalry. [Eng.]

4. (Naut.) An interior officer under the boatswain, gunner, or carpenters, charged with the stowage, account, and distribution of the stores.

   Yeoman of the guard, one of the bodyguard of the English sovereign, consisting of the hundred yeomen, armed with partisans, and habited in the costume of the sixteenth century. They are members of the royal household.

c.1300, "attendant in a noble household," of unknown origin, perhaps a contraction of Old English iunge man "young man," or from an unrecorded Old English *geaman, equivalent of Old Frisian gaman "villager," from Old English -gea "district, region, village," cognate with Old Frisian ga, ge, German Gau, Gothic gawi, from Proto-Germanic *gaujan.\n

\nSense of "commoner who cultivates his land" is recorded from early 15c.; also the third order of fighting men (late 14c., below knights and squires, above knaves), hence yeomen's service "good, efficient service" (c.1600). Meaning "naval petty officer in charge of supplies" is first attested 1660s. Yeowoman first recorded 1852: "Then I am yeo-woman O the clumsy word!" [Tennyson, "The Foresters"]

n. 1 An official providing honorable service in a royal or high noble household, ranking between a squire and a page. Especially, a Yeoman of the Guard, a member of a ceremonial bodyguard to the UK monarch (not to be confused with a Yeoman Warder). 2 (context historical English) A former class of small freeholders who farm their own land; a commoner of good standing. 3 A subordinate, deputy, aide, or assistant. 4 A Yeoman Warder. 5 A clerk in the US navy, and US coast guard. 6 (context nautical English) In a vessel of war, the person in charge of the storeroom. 7 A member of the Yeomanry Cavalry officially chartered in 1794 originating around the 1760s. 8 A member of the Imperial Yeomanry officially created in 1890s and renamed in 1907.

1. n. officer in the (ceremonial) bodyguard of the British monarch [syn: yeoman of the guard, beefeater]

2. in former times was free and cultivated his own land

A yeoman was a member of an English social class, generally a freeman who owned his own farm. The term was also used in North America.

Yeoman or yeomen may also refer to:

A yeoman is an enlisted person within the United States Navy that performs administrative and clerical work. They deal with protocol, naval instructions, enlisted evaluations, commissioned officer fitness reports, naval messages, visitors, telephone calls and mail (both conventional and electronic). They organize files and operate office equipment and order and distribute office supplies. They write and type business and social letters, notices, directives, forms and reports.

Yeoman is a surname, and may refer to:

• Bill Yeoman
• Owain Yeoman
• Ray Yeoman
• Richard S. Yeoman
• Robert Yeoman
• Richard Yeoman-Clark

Yeoman is an open source client-side development stack, consisting of tools and frameworks intended to help developers build web applications. Yeoman runs as a command-line interface written for Node.js and which combines several functions into one place, such as generating a starter template, managing dependencies, running unit tests, providing a local development server, and optimizing production code for deployment.

Yeoman was released at Google I/O 2012.

A yeoman was a member of a social class in late medieval to early modern England. In early recorded uses, a yeoman was an attendant in a noble household; hence titles such as "Yeoman of the Chamber", "Yeoman of the Crown", "Yeoman Usher", "King's Yeoman", Yeomen Warders, Yeomen of the Guard. The later sense of yeoman as "a commoner who cultivates his own land" is recorded from the 15th century; in military context, yeoman was the rank of the third order of "fighting men", below knights and squires, but above knaves. A specialized meaning in naval terminology, " petty officer in charge of supplies", arose in the 1660s.

The term is first recorded c. 1300. Its etymology is unclear. It may be a contraction of Old English iunge man, meaning "young man" (compare knave, meaning "boy"), but there are alternative suggestions, such as derivation from an otherwise unattested *geaman ( Old Frisian gaman, from gea- "province") meaning "villager; rustic". The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale appears in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400.

Yeoman (F) was a rank in the U.S. Naval Reserve in World War I. The first Yeoman (F) was Loretta Perfectus Walsh. At the time, the women were popularly referred to as "yeomanettes" or even "yeowomen", although the official designation was Yeoman (F).

The U.S. Naval Reserve Act of 1916 permitted the enlistment of qualified "persons" for service; Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels asked, "Is there any law that says a Yeoman must be a man?" and was told there was not. He began enlisting females as Yeoman (F), and in less than a month the Navy officially swore in the first female sailor in U.S. history.

Typically, female Yeoman reservists performed clerical duties such as typing, stenography, bookkeeping, accounting, inventory control, and telephone operation. A few became radio operators, electricians, draftsmen, pharmacists, photographers, telegraphers, fingerprint experts, chemists, torpedo assemblers and camouflage designers. Female Yeomen did not attend boot camp. A large number were stationed in Washington, D.C., while others served in naval stations, hospitals, shipyards and munitions factories around the country. Many recruiting stations employed the women who volunteered there as very effective recruiters, and as many as forty women served in England, France, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Canal Zone, Guam, and the Territory of Hawaii.

Without new technologies, the Navy would never have had enough jobs to employ 11,274 female Yeomen. Also, having women in uniform was a positive image for the Navy to project. As well as their many military duties, the women were taught to march and drill at public rallies, recruiting campaigns, war bond drives, and troop send-offs.