What's the difference between land and serf?

Land


Definition:

  • (n.) Urine. See Lant.
  • (n.) The solid part of the surface of the earth; -- opposed to water as constituting a part of such surface, especially to oceans and seas; as, to sight land after a long voyage.
  • (n.) Any portion, large or small, of the surface of the earth, considered by itself, or as belonging to an individual or a people, as a country, estate, farm, or tract.
  • (n.) Ground, in respect to its nature or quality; soil; as, wet land; good or bad land.
  • (n.) The inhabitants of a nation or people.
  • (n.) The mainland, in distinction from islands.
  • (n.) The ground or floor.
  • (n.) The ground left unplowed between furrows; any one of several portions into which a field is divided for convenience in plowing.
  • (n.) Any ground, soil, or earth whatsoever, as meadows, pastures, woods, etc., and everything annexed to it, whether by nature, as trees, water, etc., or by the hand of man, as buildings, fences, etc.; real estate.
  • (n.) The lap of the strakes in a clinker-built boat; the lap of plates in an iron vessel; -- called also landing.
  • (n.) In any surface prepared with indentations, perforations, or grooves, that part of the surface which is not so treated, as the level part of a millstone between the furrows, or the surface of the bore of a rifled gun between the grooves.
  • (v. t.) To set or put on shore from a ship or other water craft; to disembark; to debark.
  • (v. t.) To catch and bring to shore; to capture; as, to land a fish.
  • (v. t.) To set down after conveying; to cause to fall, alight, or reach; to bring to the end of a course; as, he landed the quoit near the stake; to be thrown from a horse and landed in the mud; to land one in difficulties or mistakes.
  • (v. i.) To go on shore from a ship or boat; to disembark; to come to the end of a course.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) 2.35pm: West Ham co-owner David Sullivan has admitted that a deal to land Miroslav Klose is unlikely to go through following the striker's star performances in South Africa.
  • (2) Certainly, Saunders did not land a single blow that threatened to stop his opponent, although he took quite a few himself that threatened his titles in the final few rounds.
  • (3) Moments later, explosive charges blasted free two tungsten blocks, to shift the balance of the probe so it could fly itself to a prearranged landing spot .
  • (4) Roger Madelin, the chief executive of the developers Argent, which consulted the prince's aides on the £2bn plan to regenerate 27 hectares (67 acres) of disused rail land at Kings Cross in London, said the prince now has a similar stature as a consultee as statutory bodies including English Heritage, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and professional bodies including Riba and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.
  • (5) On land, the pits' stagnant pools of water become breeding grounds for dengue fever and malaria.
  • (6) Rule-abiding parents can get a monthly stipend, extra pension benefits when they are older, preferential hospital treatment, first choice for government jobs, extra land allowances and, in some case, free homes and a tonne of free water a month.
  • (7) The worldwide pattern of movement of DDT residues appears to be from the land through the atmosphere into the oceans and into the oceanic abyss.
  • (8) The report warned that 24m acres of unprotected forest lands across the southeastern US are at risk, largely from European biomass operations.
  • (9) City landed the former Barcelona chief executive, Ferran Soriano , and many thought the two former Barça men's recruitment looked a threat to the Italian, especially with Pep Guardiola on sabbatical and looming over any potential vacancies at Europe's top clubs.
  • (10) The court ruling is just the latest attempt to squeeze Abdi off her land.
  • (11) Dealers speculated that Facebook's army of bankers had stepped in to stop the shares falling below $38, a move that would have landed the social network with a public relations disaster on its first day as a public company.
  • (12) Before 1948, the Bedouin tribes lived and grazed their animals on much of the Negev, claiming ancestral rights to the land.
  • (13) Don was racing the Dodge through the Bonneville Salt Flats , where Gary Gabelich had just (on 23 October) broken the land-speed record.
  • (14) Crisis in Yemen – the Guardian briefing Read more “We have the permission for this plane but we have logistical problems for the landing.
  • (15) The power of the landed elite is often cited as a major structural flaw in Pakistani politics – an imbalance that hinders education, social equality and good governance (there is no agricultural tax in Pakistan).
  • (16) Even the landscape is secretive: vast tracts of crown land and hidden valleys with nothing but a dead end road and lonely farmhouse, with a tractor and trailer pulled across the farmyard for protection.
  • (17) About 53% of the continent’s total land mass is used for agriculture.
  • (18) The following year, I organised and took part in a cycle ride from John O'Groats to Land's End, covering 900 miles in nine days through this beautiful country.
  • (19) "The rise in those who are self-employed is good news, but the reality is that those who have turned to freelance work in order to pull themselves out of unemployment and those who have decided to work for themselves face a challenging tax maze that could land them in hot water should they get it wrong," says Chas Roy-Chowdhury, head of taxation at the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants.
  • (20) Rebels succeeded in hitting one of the helicopters with a Tow missile, forcing it to make an emergency landing.

Serf


Definition:

  • (v. t.) A servant or slave employed in husbandry, and in some countries attached to the soil and transferred with it, as formerly in Russia.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) This is bad news for aggregators whose digital serfs cut, paste, compile and mangle abstracts of news stories that real media outlets produce at great expense.
  • (2) His moment of fame is over and he vanishes into the shadowlands of Britain's serf-labour force.
  • (3) The Pavlovs, a highly achievement-oriented family descending from a lowly serf, improved their social status by serving the Russian Orthodox Church.
  • (4) They desired, rather, that it be lived on a higher level than that of a serf, treated as an inconvenience by a moribund oligarchy.
  • (5) It is the centenary of President Lincoln's inauguration, and of the beginning of the Civil War which ended with the liberation of the American slaves; it is also the centenary of the decree that emancipated the Russian serfs.
  • (6) At their best, blogs such as Nightjack, or the Civil Serf who revealed life in a Whitehall office before also being exposed, made the public services more open, and improved debate about how they should run.
  • (7) It is "simply disgusting at a time when people are struggling to heat their homes, these energy barons are treating them like serfs, and the government and the regulator are letting them get away with it," he said.
  • (8) So, he put his best serfs on it and came up with a birth certificate naming his father, Fred.
  • (9) The oldest is a 64-year-old who fled civil war only to find herself virtually imprisoned in the UK as an unpaid domestic serf.
  • (10) This threat is used to justify the absence of a constitution, the destruction of the judicial system, and the implementation of indefinite national service that allows the government to treat each civilian as a modern-day serf for their whole life.
  • (11) As always, the rich and powerful want to know all they can about us – "the serfs and slaves" as Assange called us – while letting us know as little as possible about them.
  • (12) The situation in the UK (as in Italy) continues to be insupportable, yet somewhat like "serfs", we've seemed resigned to suffering it, as if no serious alternative existed.
  • (13) In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law which introduced some protections for these imported serfs, under what has become known as the guest-worker program.
  • (14) Almost all low-paid work is essential: a living wage would stop cheapskate employers scrounging off tax credits and importing what too often looks like serf-labour.
  • (15) Thirty per cent are labourers, labour tenants, and squatters on white farms and work and live under conditions similar to those of the serfs of the middle ages.
  • (16) A case could be made that the unhappy family of the opening is the Russian aristocracy in the 1870s, trying to hold the line against excessive change after the grant of freedom to millions of human beings it had owned as slaves, the peasant serfs, in 1861.
  • (17) But all the baggage of that word (unelected, concentrated power keeping serfs in chains) has no meaning at all applied to Christine Blower, the elected representative of working people whose decisions she can argue for or against but must always reflect.
  • (18) "Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings not down to serfs and slaves.
  • (19) That was Charles –  impatient, controlling but also thoughtful towards his serfs.
  • (20) Back then Wimbledon felt like – in fact prided itself on being – a leftover from some ancien regime, with the players toiling and serfing on the lawns of a feudal estate.