sharecropper

noun share·crop·per \ ˈsher-ˌkrä-pər \

|Updated on: 10 Jun 2018

: a tenant farmer especially in the southern U.S. who is provided with credit for seed, tools, living quarters, and food, who works the land, and who receives an agreed share of the value of the crop minus charges

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Recent Examples of sharecropper from the Web

Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset in Norway in 1859 to a poor sharecropper.

— howard schneider, WSJ, "‘Hell’s Princess’ Review: A Butcher Named Belle," 18 May 2018
His father passed away before young Eddy was a teenager, setting about a series of circumstances that forced the Arnold family to be sharecroppers on their own land.

— chuck dauphin, Billboard, "How Eddy Arnold's Grandson Is Furthering the Country Great's Legacy," 17 May 2018
Seventy-three percent of the county’s population is African American, a vestige of the former slaves who stayed in the area after the Civil War and became sharecroppers.

— michael harriot, The Root, "Lowndes County, Ala.: The Place God Forgot," 27 Apr. 2018
This month the 72-year-old Mr Hamm, son of an Oklahoma cotton sharecropper who went on to become one of the founding fathers of the shale revolution, had a different message.

— The Economist, "American shale-oil producers are on a roll," 10 May 2018
Gorence, who had just turned 24, covered Alabama politics, protests and marches and interviewed sharecropper families to tell their stories.

— meg jones, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "MLK Vignettes: Retired judge Patricia Gorence covered civil rights as student journalist in Alabama," 23 Mar. 2018
Born to sharecroppers in South Carolina in 1909, McLaurin lived in a time when racial segregation was still legal and women did not have the right to vote.

— elyse samuels, Washington Post, "Virginia McLaurin is celebrating her 109th birthday in style," 6 Mar. 2018
Affirmative action opened previously closed doors in education and employment, turning sharecroppers who’d pulled cotton in the dry hot fields of Texas into shareholder of Texas Instruments.

— The Root, "What Does It Mean to Have a 'Gentrified' Martin Luther King, Jr. When Some Blacks Are the Gentrifiers?," 15 Jan. 2018
My grandfather on my paternal side, Richard Frazier, was born in the late 1850s, and therefore was born into slavery, but was a sharecropper in South Carolina for his entire life.

— david gelles, New York Times, "Merck C.E.O. Ken Frazier on Death Row Cases and the Corporate Soul," 9 Mar. 2018

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

First Known Use of sharecropper

1923

in the meaning defined above

See Words from the same year

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Other Agriculture/Gardening Terms

fallow, graft, heirloom, loam, potash, soilage, swath, tilth, windfall

SHARECROPPER Defined for English Language Learners

sharecropper

noun

: a farmer especially in the southern U.S. who raises crops for the owner of a piece of land and is paid a portion of the money from the sale of the crops