bondservant

/ ˈbɒndˌsɜːvənt /

noun

1. a serf or slave

Example Sentences

Through Wright, Dr. Spence met the biographer Fang Chao-Ying and was granted special access to papers in Taiwan from the Qing dynasty, material used in Dr. Spence’s dissertation and his first book, “Ts’ao Yin and the K’ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master,” which came out in 1966, the same year he joined the Yale faculty.

From Washington Post

Through Wright, he met the biographer Fang Chao-ying and was granted special access to papers in Taiwan from the Qing dynasty, material used in his dissertation and his first book, “Ts’ao Yin and the K’ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master,” which came out in 1966, the same year he joined the Yale faculty.

From Seattle Times

It's not like this weird, churchy word "bondservant," which is intended, I think, to create some rhetorical difference between what a slave really was and this kind of nice version of slavery that Christians would like to pretend the Bible talks about.

From Salon

In revisions from 2001 through 2016, Perry shows, the word "slave" first gains a footnote, then moves to the footnote and then disappears entirely — in some contexts, like Colossians 3:22, though not others — to be replaced by the word "bondservant," which could be described as a politically correct euphemism.

From Salon

So what you can see in the English Standard Version is that with each successive wave, from the 2001 revision of the Revised Standard Version to the 2011 revision and then finally in 2016, our most recent revision, was that they started by introducing a footnote in 2001 to the "slave" word, and then in 2011 they replace the slave word and put it in a footnote, and then they said, "We're going to call this a bondservant. So it's different from a slave."

From Salon