metayer
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
One who cultivates land for a share (usually half) of its yield, receiving stock, tools, and seed from the landlord.
name
A surname.
Example Sentences
- "The metayer furnishes his labour, his ignorance, and his good appetite; the proprietor supplying an exhausted soil[…]"
- "A majority of the properties are so small as not to afford a subsistence to the proprietors, of whom, according to some computations, as many as three millions are obliged to eke out their means of support either by working for hire, or by taking additional land, generally on metayer tenure."
- "A "submerged tenth" of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per cent who are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of semi-metayers and wage-laborers"
Etymology
Borrowed from French métayer.