slave
/sleɪv
/noun
1(Especially in the past) a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them: he killed the natives or turned them into slaves...
- At any time, a master could confiscate any money that a slave had saved up, and the slave had no legal recourse.
- A University of Pennsylvania report estimates 750,000 women were trafficked into the U.S. as sex slaves in the past decade.
- While a slave could be raffled off or wagered at the master's whim, freeing a slave was fraught with legal obstacles.
Synonyms
bondsman, bondswoman, bondservant, bondslave, serf, vassal, thrall
historical helot, odalisque, blackbird, hierodule
1.1A person who works very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation: by the time I was ten, I had become her slave, doing all the housework...
- The media joked that men would become domestic slaves to working women.
- Citizens enjoy being lackeys and slaves to rich folks.
- Many women are virtual slaves to their pimps, snared by false protestations of love, and then held in his thrall by a combination of violence and spurious affection.
Synonyms
drudge, servant, general factotum, man/maid of all work, lackey, minion, galley slave
informal gofer, bitch
British informal skivvy, dogsbody, slavey, poodle, fag
rare slaveling
1.2A person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something: the poorest people of the world are slaves to the banks she was no slave to fashion...
- He insists designers must look to the future or become slaves to the past.
- But it is wrong to become a slave to food or to let it control you.
- I am a free man, not a number; not a slave to silly ideas, not all that crazy and not one to suffer fools gladly!
1.3A device, or part of one, directly controlled by another: [as modifier]: a slave cassette deck...Compare with master1.
- The link slave devices and the link controller include protocol logic for communication according to a bidirectional protocol.
- The arbiter device receives requests for data transfers from the master devices and selectively transmits the requests to the slave devices.
- Power down your old computer, and install the new drive as a slave device to your old drive.
verb [no object]
1Work excessively hard: after slaving away for fourteen years all he gets is two thousand...
- We are having sound and plasma screens in all the rooms, and we won't have to spend weekends slaving over DIY.
- You've been slaving over dinosaur details for days on end.
- But when I got home, Justin had obviously spent all day slaving away, making a 3 course dinner.
Synonyms
toil, labour, grind, sweat, work one's fingers to the bone, work day and night, work like a Trojan/dog, keep one's nose to the grindstone, exert oneself, grub, plod, plough
informal work one's guts out, work one's socks off, kill oneself, sweat blood, knock oneself out, plug away, slog away
British informal graft, fag
Australian/New Zealand informal bullock
British vulgar slang work one's balls/arse/nuts off
North American vulgar slang work one's ass/butt off
archaic drudge, travail, moil
1.1 [with object] Subject (a device) to control by another: should the need arise, the two channels can be slaved together...
- The helmet measures the pilot's line of sight to the target so the sensors, avionics and weapons are slaved to the target.
- The commander has the option of handing off the target to the gunner or of slaving the gun to the commander's sight and initiating the fire.
- During flight the missile is automatically slaved at about 0.5m above the line-of-sight to avoid obstacles.
Origin
Middle English: shortening of Old French esclave, equivalent of medieval Latin sclava (feminine) 'Slavonic (captive)': the Slavonic peoples had been reduced to a servile state by conquest in the 9th century.
Our word slave was shortened from early French esclave in the Middle Ages. In medieval Latin the equivalent form sclavus is identical with Sclavus, the source of Slav. The Slavic peoples of eastern and central Europe had been conquered and reduced to a servile state during the 9th century. Wage slaves is a term used in the English translation of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.