(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.
Slave
Definition:
(n.) See Slav.
(n.) A person who is held in bondage to another; one who is wholly subject to the will of another; one who is held as a chattel; one who has no freedom of action, but whose person and services are wholly under the control of another.
(n.) One who has lost the power of resistance; one who surrenders himself to any power whatever; as, a slave to passion, to lust, to strong drink, to ambition.
(n.) A drudge; one who labors like a slave.
(n.) An abject person; a wretch.
(v. i.) To drudge; to toil; to labor as a slave.
(v. t.) To enslave.
Example Sentences:
(1) So Huck Finn floats down the great river that flows through the heart of America, and on this adventure he is accompanied by the magnificent figure of Jim, a runaway slave, who is also making his bid for freedom.
(2) As plantation owners go, Ford is a kindly sort: he delivers sermons and permits his slaves moments of humanity, even giving Northup a violin.
(3) It traces his progress of degradation unhampered by constituted authority and concludes with his magnum opus--the greatest massacre of South Sea Islanders in the annals of the South Sea slave trade.
(4) More than twice as large as Europe, Brazil has a population of 199 million, made up of descendants of colonial settlers, their slaves, survivors of the indigenous tribes they decimated and 20th-century waves of migration from Japan, Lebanon, Europe and elsewhere.
(5) The transformation of the global slave trade from a high-cost, slow-recruitment business to a low-cost, rapid-recruitment one is driving criminal interest in trafficking and slavery, which is why it is permeating every corner of the global economy.
(6) JV If you go back to a western point of view from the time, even the Romans, the slaves worked then in a feudal society.
(7) Northup eventually detailed his experiences in a book, also titled Twelve Years a Slave , which helped historians build a picture of the slave experience at the time.
(8) She was repeatedly raped, beaten and “treated like a slave” throughout her teenage years.
(9) As well as World War Z, Plan B has also produced 12 Years A Slave , the much-lauded slave drama released in the UK on January 10.
(10) Pathological changes indicate that the cemetery contained individuals representing two slave occupational groups, house servants and laborers.
(11) The irony of her image being exchanged in return for commodities in the future,” she said, “seems to recall the way that actual slaves’ bodies were serving as currencies of exchange.” Larson arrived at a different conclusion about the honor.
(12) It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse.” The pamphlet added that it was also permissible to buy, sell, or give as a gift female slaves, “for they are merely property, which can be disposed of”.
(13) From the steel mines where child slaves gather surgical steel, all the way up to senior doctors working 36 hours on no sleep, the most healthy people in the NHS are actually the patients.
(14) The report said Isis had begun holding online slave auctions with an encrypted application to circulate photos of captured Yazidi women and girls.
(15) The much anticipated landslide for Steve McQueen's powerful slavery drama 12 Years A Slave did not materialise, although it gained a single and respectfully prominent win as best film (drama).
(16) Alfonso Cuarón has won the best director Oscar for Gravity at the 86th Academy Awards, defeating a field that included 12 Years a Slave's Steve McQueen, Nebraska's Alexander Payne and Martin Scorsese for The Wolf of Wall Street.
(17) The details of her biography presented here are not as well known--especially the subsequent course of her illness and treatment and her struggle against prostitution and the white slave trade, the latter carried on with special fascination.
(18) But making immigration work for everyone and not just a few means people should contribute before they claim and we should never, ever allow companies to undercut wages and conditions of workers here by paying slave wages to those brought in from overseas.” Miliband also criticised the prime minister for his failure to commit to TV debates during the general election campaign, claiming Cameron was desperate because he “knows he has failed”.
(19) "She said she is going to be sold as a slave this afternoon, for $10," Kaliph said, his tears dropping into the brown dust.
(20) Twelve Years a Slave's Lupita Nyong'o and Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie officially joined the cast earlier this week, and the film will also feature Attack the Block's John Boyega, Ingmar Bergman-regular Max von Sydow and Harry Potter's Domhnall Gleeson.