Meaning & use

peasant

noun·Academic

A poor farmer or agricultural worker, especially one from earlier historical periods or traditional rural societies.

See it in a sentence

Medieval peasants worked the land in exchange for protection from the local lord.

The novel follows a peasant family struggling to survive a harsh winter.

A note on using this word

Peasant is mainly used in historical, literary, or academic contexts today, and can sound insulting if applied casually to modern people.

Words with a similar meaning

farmhandserf

Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.

Words with an opposite meaning

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