# slave

Pronunciation: say "SLAYV" /sleɪv/

## Noun

1. A person held as the property of another or held by force, whose labor, body, and life are under the control of the owner or captor, including someone forced into sexual exploitation.
   - Simple: A person who is owned by someone else or held by force and made to work or serve without freedom.
   - _The ship carried hundreds of slaves across the Atlantic to be sold at auction._
   - _Frederick Douglass escaped from life as a slave in Maryland and became a leading abolitionist._
2. A person who is unable to resist something and surrenders to or is dominated by it.
   - Simple: Someone who cannot say no to something and lets it control their life.
   - _He had become a slave to ambition, sacrificing friendships and health for the next promotion._
   - _Critics called the composer a slave to convention, unwilling to break a single rule of form._
3. A drudge; a person who labors, or is bound by contract to labor, with severely limited rights, such as an indentured servant.
   - Simple: A person who must work very hard with few rights and little freedom.
   - _Indentured servants crossed the ocean as virtual slaves, bound to their masters for seven years._
   - _The intern complained that he was treated as a slave, fetching coffee and running errands without a word of thanks._
5. A device controlled by or kept in step with another device, the master, such as a secondary flash unit; also, the second of two drives on an older shared cable, where the label is nominal.
   - Simple: A device that another device, called the master, controls or leads, or the second drive in an older two-drive setup.
   - _On older PCs, you set jumpers to mark one drive as the master and the other as the slave._
   - _A slave unit on the studio wall fires whenever it detects the burst from the master flash._
6. An abject person; one who is wretched, degraded, or servile in spirit.
   - Simple: A person seen as low, worthless, or without pride or self-respect, often called this as an insult.
   - _'Cowards and slaves!' the captain roared at the men who refused to leave the trench._
   - _He bowed and scraped before the duke like the meanest slave at court._

## Verb

4. To work very hard, with continuous and tiring effort.
   - Simple: To work very hard for a long time.
   - _We slaved for weeks to get the report finished before the deadline._
   - _Why slave at a job you hate when you could find something better?_
7. To connect a device so that it operates under another device's control.
   - Simple: To set a device so that another device controls it.
   - _The engineers slaved the second motor to the first so both ran at the same speed._
   - _The studio can slave both tape machines to a single timecode source._
8. To take part in the slave trade, capturing people and enslaving them.
   - Simple: To capture people and sell them, or force them to work as property.
   - _In the eighteenth century, the company's ships were slaving off the West African coast, carrying captives to plantations overseas._
   - _Barbary corsairs continued to slave across the Mediterranean until the early nineteenth century._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A submissive partner in a BDSM relationship who consensually serves and obeys one or more masters or mistresses, sexually or personally.

## Origin

Late Latin Sclavus ("Slav") gave Medieval Latin sclavus ("slave"), traditionally explained by how often Slavs were enslaved during the Middle Ages. The word passed through Old French esclave into Middle English sclave, the source of the modern English form. The Latin itself traces to Byzantine Greek Sklábos, though another theory connects sclavus instead with Ancient Greek skūleúō ("to strip or despoil a slain enemy").

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/slave (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).