half-free
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: 5.20 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Many half-free slaves were forced to continue to work for the Dutch West India Company even after they were set free, and the company even required half-free blacks to pay a yearly tax consisting of crops that they had raised on their farms."
- "“Half-free” meant that the slaves themselves were now free, but their children would return to slavery. The Dutch gave a half-free slave named Gratia d'Angola a 10acre farm in the 1640s, centered around what is today one block of Greene Street between Prince Street and Houston Street, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan."
- "Yet first, the anonymous rabbis and students begin the sequence of explorations in legality of marriage between half-free people by using more general rules of betrothal."
Etymology
From Middle English *half-free, from Old English healffrēo (“half-free”), equivalent to half- + free. Cognate with Dutch halfvrij (“half-free”), German halbfrei (“half-free”), Danish halvfri (“half-free”).