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servant

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈsɜːvənt//
  • United States//ˈsɝvənt//
  • United States/[ˈsɝvn̩ʔ]/

One who is hired to perform regular household or other duties, and receives compensation. As opposed to a slave.

noun

  1. 1

    One who is hired to perform regular household or other duties, and receives compensation. As opposed to a slave.

    There are three servants in the household, the butler and two maids.

    In the great houses, servants out of livery help to the different plats, servants in livery holding the dishes, sauces, etc., and changing the plates.

    As a political system democracy seems to me extraordinarily foolish, but I would not go out of my way to protest against it. My servant is, so far as I am concerned, welcome to as many votes as he can get. I would very gladly make mine over to him if I could.

  2. 2

    One who serves another, providing help in some manner.

    She is quite the humble servant, the poor in this city owe much to her but she expects nothing.

  3. 3

    A person who dedicates themselves to God.

  4. 4

    obsoleteA professed lover.

  5. 5

    A person of low condition or spirit.

Etymology

From Middle English servaunt, from Old French servant, from the present participle of the verb servir. Doublet of sergeant and servient. Morphologically serve + -ant. Displaced native Old English þeġn.

verb

  1. 1

    obsoleteTo subject.

    Wife, Mother, Child, I know not. My affaires Are Seruanted to others[…]

Forms

plural
servants
past tense
servanted
past participle
servanted
present participle
servanting
third person singular
servants
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).