as in slavery
the state of being an enslaved person the Fugitive Slave Act had the effect of returning enslaved people who had made it to freedom in the North to a brutal life of servitude in the South

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Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of servitude The word robot comes from the Czech word ‘robota’ which meant involuntary servitude, something very close to slavery, says Novakova. Bruce Dorminey, Forbes.com, 10 Sep. 2025 But perhaps the consequence was that some deeper servitude had been inflicted elsewhere. Rachel Cusk, New Yorker, 24 Aug. 2025 Its clients happen to be from a more progressive section of the galaxy where thinking machines have the same rights as any human; to Murderbot, however, that reality doesn’t look much different from servitude. Emma Stefansky, The Atlantic, 5 July 2025 There are no piano players, there is no music without the technicians who work in a quiet servitude of maintaining these instruments. Etan Vlessing, HollywoodReporter, 3 Sep. 2019 See All Example Sentences for servitude
Recent Examples of Synonyms for servitude
slavery
Noun
  • Once freed from slavery, Washington toiled in coal mines, worked as a janitor in exchange for formal education and became a great American orator and leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
    Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica, 22 Oct. 2025
  • How the stakeholders juggled those diametrically opposed ideas—liberty and self-governance but also slavery and their horrific treatment of the Native American population—is the part of the human experience that Burns is most interested in exploring.
    Carlo Versano, MSNBC Newsweek, 22 Oct. 2025

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Cite this Entry

“Servitude.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/servitude. Accessed 28 Oct. 2025.

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