agrarian

adjective agrar·i·an \ ə-ˈgrer-ē-ən \

|Updated on: 26 May 2018

Examples: agrarian in a Sentence

Editor's Note: Did You Know?

Definition of agrarian

1 : of or relating to fields or lands or their tenure

agrarian landscapes

2 a : of, relating to, or characteristic of farmers or their way of life

agrarian values

b : organized or designed to promote agricultural interests

an agrarian political party

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Examples of agrarian in a Sentence

a town founded in 1811 as an agrarian community

Recent Examples of agrarian from the Web

Over the last four decades, South Korea has moved from a poor, largely agrarian society to one of the world’s largest economies.

— kelly kasulis, Time, "Why South Korea’s Conservative Christians Don’t Want to Get Cozier With the North," 26 Apr. 2018
Largely agrarian North Korea has a GDP less than 1% of the South, which is the world’s 11th biggest economy, boasting some of the top tech and engineering firms.

— charlie campbell, Time, "What Would Korean Reunification Look Like? Five Glaring Problems to Overcome," 26 Apr. 2018
In Guanajuato, clusters of factories, some larger than New York City's Central Park, spread across an agrarian landscape.

— marc vartabedian, latimes.com, "In Mexico's own Motor City, billion-dollar investments but also fear of Trump's trade moves," 23 Apr. 2018
A century later, agrarian socialists won control of provincial governments in the western prairies.

— The Economist, "Anti-elitist politicians in Canada are courting immigrants," 19 Apr. 2018
The majority of the immigrants were from the agrarian but poor County Mayo.

— cleveland.com, "The Irish and St. Patrick's Day in Cleveland: Vintage photos," 13 Mar. 2018
What can be done to address the risk of climate change in Myanmar, or in other rural, agrarian regions?

— eli meixler / singapore, Time, "‘If I Give You Choice, I'm Showing Respect': How This Man Uses Design to Help the World’s Poorest Farmers," 2 Apr. 2018
In February the government auditor said that 1.3bn pesos ($71m) of public money had gone missing from two ministries run by Rosario Robles, now secretary of agrarian development.

— The Economist, "How AMLO could win Mexico’s election," 28 Mar. 2018
For millions of Chinese students, that has meant hours spent memorizing dry political theory such as former leader Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents and Mao’s thinking on agrarian socialism.

— te-ping chen, WSJ, "Reading, Writing and Xi Jinping Thought: China’s Students Learn Leader’s Philosophy," 23 Mar. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'agrarian.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Did You Know?

Today, an acre is generally considered to be a unit of land measuring 43,560 square feet (4,047 square meters). Before that standard was set, it's believed that an acre represented a rougher measurement - the amount of land that could be plowed in one day with a yoke of oxen. Both acre and agrarian, derive from the Latin noun ager and the Greek noun agros, meaning "field." (You can probably guess that agriculture is another descendant.) Agrarian, first used in English in the 16th century, describes things pertaining to the cultivation of fields, as well as the farmers who cultivate them.