indentured servant

[in-den-cherd sur-vuhnt]

noun

1. a person who agrees to work for another without pay, with or without a contract, in order to repay a debt or in exchange for food and shelter.

   By financing immigrants’ passage to this country, the farmer receives steady labor from the indentured servants obliged to pay off their large debts.

indentured servant

1. A person under contract to work for another person for a definite period of time, usually without pay but in exchange for free passage to a new country. During the seventeenth century most of the white laborers in Maryland and Virginia came from England as indentured servants.

Word History and Origins

Origin of indentured servant¹

First recorded in 1665–75

Example Sentences

As the conversation gets rolling, she digs into her roots, explaining that her maternal grandmother was an illiterate indentured servant.

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Describing himself as a kind of indentured servant, he said he’d been “forced to work in a criminal enterprise, and if he didn’t, he would be killed,” Starr testified.

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But when she gets kidnapped to work as an indentured servant at the Imperial Palace, she starts making a name for herself with her scientific know-how and talents at deduction.

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Her father was a white indentured servant, a tailor named Andrew Judge, who had come to America from Leeds, England, in 1772 and gained his freedom after fulfilling the terms of his four-year contract at Mount Vernon.

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An indentured servant was typically someone who agreed to work for several years in exchange for his or her passage, eventual freedom, and the promise of some land.

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