(a.) Of or pertaining to a servant or slave; befitting a servant or a slave; proceeding from dependence; hence, meanly submissive; slavish; mean; cringing; fawning; as, servile flattery; servile fear; servile obedience.
(a.) Held in subjection; dependent; enslaved.
(a.) Not belonging to the original root; as, a servile letter.
(a.) Not itself sounded, but serving to lengthen the preceeding vowel, as e in tune.
(n.) An element which forms no part of the original root; -- opposed to radical.
Example Sentences:
(1) In its intransigence over Kashmir, the Indian state has, among other things, waged a narrative war, in which it tells itself and its citizens via servile media, that there is no dispute, that it’s an internal matter – and whatever troubles there are in the idyllic valley are the work of jihadis from Pakistan.
(2) In any case, the Brits are a notoriously lily-livered shower when it comes to workplace politics, too craven to strike – [note to non-British readers: we're a sorry servile bunch, we don't like it up us] - and as a result, poor John's failed coup has led to him becoming the most reviled union leader in British history, ahead of the excellent Bob Crow, the much misunderstood Arthur Scargill, and Gary Neville.
(3) She is still reliant on a fairy godmother ( Helena Bonham Carter ) to help wrest her from this servile purgatory, and her life ambitions still seem to include marrying a prince and wearing a very nice dress.
(4) Until this happened, the entire outside world thought of Tunisia as a downmarket tourist destination, with a servile attitude towards the west.
(5) Turnbull is likely to forge ahead with Abbott’s two-track convention process and a curated referendum council, to which mob are already saying they will not be servile.
(6) "Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded into servility.
(7) All patients had variable dysphagia of variable servility with or without aspiration.
(8) "The new servile class," is how Danny Dorling, author of So You Think You Know About Britain, refers to them and he says they've grown out of all proportion in the past 25 years.
(9) Craxi broke a long tradition of servility towards the US by facing down President Ronald Reagan over the hijack of the Achille Lauro cruise liner.
(10) Their servile acceptance of the European austerity diktat sounded their death knell.
(11) There are stereotypes of Asian women as servile, as passive, as fulfilling some kind of service role.
(12) No high growth indices or boasting about being an economic "powerhouse" can cover up the scandal of a servile adherence to colonial bigotry.
(13) She comes to save the corrupt, disgraced and servile political system," said Alexis Tsipras, who leads the opposition Syriza alliance.
(14) In Gujarat, journalists in Ahmedabad say, simple intimidation has reduced the press corps to cowed servility.
(15) On parallel narrative tracks, we follow Cecil as he serves a succession of presidents, glad that his job, however servile, has offered him an escape from the Georgia cotton fields where he grew up in the 1920s, witnessing his mother's rape and his father being shot for protesting.
(16) This seems a bit of a stretch from "seeing his nakedness", but we know the Bible has a quaint way with sexual deeds: lying with each other, knowing each other – and why would Ham's offspring be condemned to servility for an innocent incident?
(17) This caring for others out of love is not about being servile,” he said.
(18) The men bow with a touch of servility; the women follow.
(19) In the second case, a latency-age girl's coy and servile mannerisms endeared her to adults and served as a reaction formation to her own need to be nurtured.
(20) People close to the former president are dismayed by what they see as a servile, one-way relationship, in which Ghani concedes too much without getting anything in return.
Vassal
Definition:
(n.) The grantee of a fief, feud, or fee; one who holds land of superior, and who vows fidelity and homage to him; a feudatory; a feudal tenant.
(n.) A subject; a dependent; a servant; a slave.
(a.) Resembling a vassal; slavish; servile.
(v. t.) To treat as a vassal; to subject to control; to enslave.
Example Sentences:
(1) A eurozone nakedly dominated by one state, Germany, enforcing destructive austerity on its vassals with such brutality, can have no enduring legitimacy.
(2) Data previously obtained (Tartakoff, A.M., and P. Vassalli.
(3) Does it occur to you that this process is totalitarian and that you behave as if the hundreds of thousands of teachers, parents, students and academics involved in education are your vassals?
(4) Another significant reason that Kenyan forces may be trying to create in Somalia a vassal state – or "buffer zone", as the Kenyan government prefers to call it – is to protect its own projects.
(5) The disputed subtropical archipelago lies between Japan and Taiwan, and in the course of its history was a vassal state of China , paying tribute for years before coming under Japanese sovereignty.
(6) They pointed out that the kingdom had previously been a Chinese vassal state, adding that the ruling Qing dynasty had been too weak to resist Japan's advance.
(7) He said such a situation would fail to give the sovereignty over laws and borders that people wanted through the leave vote, he said, adding: “To adopt the Norwegian situation would be to become a vassal state, because you actually end up paying money into the EU budget but you have less control over the regulations than you do now with a seat round the table.” The question of the single market is opening up another potential divide for Labour after Corbyn also insisted the UK would have to leave the grouping when Brexit takes place.
(8) Farm subsidies are the 21st century equivalent of feudal aid: the taxes medieval vassals were forced to pay their lords for the privilege of being sat upon.
(9) Gardiner also used the interview to claim that the UK would become a “vassal state” if it tried to replicate Norway, which has unfettered access to single market through its membership of the European Economic Area.
(10) The party believed Scotland was theirs for keeps, that voters could go nowhere else (whoops); and, in turn, Westminster Labour saw Scottish Labour as its vassal, too.
(11) We now want to focus also on cultural tourism, valorising our archaeological sites like Carthage, El Jam and the Bardo National Museum, where the richest collection of Roman mosaics in the world is kept.” Much of the compound was designed by and for the Beys, vassal-kings who ruled the area on behalf of the Ottoman empire from the early 18th century.
(12) Measurements of leukocyte enzymes confirm the findings of Vassalli et al.
(13) It wasn't all wrath and fury – although Putin made sure to point out that the US feared Russia's geographical size and its nuclear arsenal and "didn't want allies, but vassals".
(14) Here, Benedita Rocha, Pierre Vassalli and Delphine Guy-Grand discuss the rules of selection of extrathymic T cells, assess the possible role of these cells in the defence of epithelial integrity and their potential role in autoimmune disease.
(15) Editors, two of whose journalists had been jailed at the time of the scandal concerning the Soviet spy John Vassall, were reluctant to cross the Macmillan government again.
(16) The participants include not just practicing architects – such as the French duo Lacaton & Vassal, masterminds of the barely-there Palais de Tokyo in Paris – but also artists (like Pedro Reyes) and hybrid outfits such as the Turner Prize-nominated collective Assemble.
(17) Several cell types display binding sites for [125I]urokinase (Vassalli, J.-D., D. Baccino, D. Belin.