indentured servant

noun

|Updated on: 20 Jun 2018

Definition of indentured servant

: a person who signs and is bound by indentures to work for another for a specified time especially in return for payment of travel expenses and maintenance

Recent Examples of indentured servant from the Web

Instead, these immigrants were deceived, overworked and unable to escape their hardship, essentially held as indentured servants.

— gene baur, Fortune, "Immigrant Farm Workers Endure Inhumane Conditions. Here’s What We Can Do," 8 June 2018
An ongoing investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found that many programs exploit this arrangement, providing few actual services while turning participants into indentured servants.

— amy julia harris and shoshana walter, charlotteobserver, "Drug users got exploited. Disabled patients got hurt. One woman benefited from it all. | Charlotte Observer," 21 May 2018
This would also make the whole system less exploitative, so that moms like Kylia Carter didn't feel like their sons were treated like indentured servants.

— shawn windsor, Detroit Free Press, "Ending exploitation of athletes would be good start to fixing NCAA," 13 May 2018
Indeed, these boat records indicate that indentured servants departing for English colonies were predominantly from the regions identified by our language analysis.

— nicole creanza, Scientific American, "How People Talk Now Holds Clues about Human Migration Centuries Ago," 4 Mar. 2018
European indentured servants, considered poor whites, who were given the opportunity to be overseers of plantations to keep slaves in line, now hauntingly echoes modern-day law enforcement taking over that overseer responsibility in society.

— jo ann zuniga, Houston Chronicle, "Time to write a new chapter on what truly makes America great," 9 May 2018
But companies have made no such effort at the southern California ports, even after hundreds of truckers told regulators they were treated as modern-day indentured servants.

— brett murphy, Detroit Free Press, "Retail giants enable trucker exploitation," 29 June 2017
Similarly, the enslavement of Africans in the South helped the region’s white indentured servants graduate into legal and political equality.

— eric levitz, Daily Intelligencer, "America Will Only Remain ‘Majority White’ If Blacks Remain An Underclass," 3 May 2018
Giannini’s fourth great-grandfather, Antonio Giannini, and his family came to the colonies from Italy in 1773 as indentured servants.

— stephanie farr, Philly.com, "Independence Park's longest-tenured staffer has personal connections to history | We the People," 21 Mar. 2018

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