slavery

1. 1
   noununcountable

   A system or social practice in which people are owned as property, especially for use as forced laborers.

   The plantation economy depended almost entirely on slavery for its labor.

   Historians continue to study how slavery shaped the nation's wealth.

   Similarservitude, bondage

   Oppositefreedom, liberty, emancipation

   Note

   The word is built from slave plus -ery, the ending that names a practice or condition. Its core meaning is the institution itself. It is usually uncountable and pairs with the language of law and policy: the abolition of slavery, a slavery system, modern slavery. The plural slaveries exists, but most writing treats the word as a single mass noun.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The state of servitude endured by someone held and treated as a slave.

   The memoir describes his decades of slavery under a brutal master.

   She was born into slavery but later purchased her own freedom.

   Similarservitude, bondage, captivity, subjugation

   Oppositefreedom, liberty, emancipation

   Note

   Here the word turns from the system to the person living under it. Slavery in this sense is something one is born into, endures, or escapes. In Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, a captive is told he may stay willingly or else be "forc'd with slavery." The contrast is with a life one chooses. Compare the institution, which is something a society has, not something a person suffers.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   Forced labor of any kind, whether or not it is legal.

   Investigators uncovered slavery on fishing boats where men worked without pay.

   Modern slavery still traps millions of people in forced labor today.

   Similarservitude, bondage

   Oppositefreedom

4. 4
   nounfigurativelyuncountable

   A condition in which one is captivated or subjugated by something such as greed or drugs.

   Years of addiction left him in a kind of slavery to the drug.

   The poet wrote about humanity's slavery to greed and ambition.

   Similarbondage, servitude, subjection, thrall

   Oppositefreedom, liberation

   Note

   The figurative use keeps the image of chains but drops the owner. What holds the person is a craving, a habit, or an appetite. Shelley's The Revolt of Islam (1818) gives the classic shape: man digs for gold to "weave / A lasting chain for his own slavery." The thing that enslaves usually follows to, as in slavery to greed, and the bondage is often self-made.

5. 5
   adjective

   Covered in saliva running or dribbling from the mouth.

   The giant snow bear, the wolf with slavery jaws or the claws of the silent great cats were all a part. Creatures of man's oldest nightmares were the other side of that face.

   2014, Lisa Williamson, Echoes of Elder Times Collection

   Note

   This is a different word that only shares the spelling. It comes from slaver, meaning drool, plus the adjective ending -y, the same pattern as slobbery. In the wolf with slavery jaws, from Lisa Williamson's Echoes of Elder Times Collection (2014), it is a true adjective, not the noun for the institution used as a modifier. It compares as more slavery and most slavery. Slobbery avoids the ambiguity.

Showing meanings only. Show all 5