dwarf-holder
English
Alternative forms
- dwarfholder, dwarf holder
Etymology
From dwarf + holder, by analogy with smallholder. First attested in the 1930s.
Noun
dwarf-holder (plural dwarf-holders)
- A poor farmer with a very small holding, especially one smaller than required for subsistence.
- 1956, Carlile Aylmer Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945, volume 1, page 122:
- It represented the rural middle classes against the bigger men, especially against their creditors, but it neither represented nor cared for the dwarf-holders, still less the agricultural labourers.
- 1987, Richard J. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria, →ISBN, page 89:
- The fund would consist of land confiscated from all owners, individual and institutional, who, according to the new bill, held more than was socially acceptable; the confiscated land would be redistributed amongst the landless and the dwarf-holders.
- 2001, David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe, →ISBN, page 282:
- This was a time of land hunger and severely declining living standards for the teeming mass of smallholders, cottagers, and landless laborers who crowded onto the land. The world of the Halesowen dwarf-holders was terrible.
-
Hypernyms
- smallholder (farmer)
Translations
farmer with very small holding
|