- 1農民階級、農民（全體）；多用於歷史或社會階級的討論
The peasantry means all the peasants of a country taken together as one group — the poor farming people who worked the land, usually owning little or none of it. It is a collective noun, so it is one word for a whole class of people, and it normally takes 'the': 'the peasantry of eighteenth-century France'. You will meet it almost only in history books, in writing about and revolutions, and in discussions of old social classes; it is not a word for the news or for chat. Because it names a class, it sits next to words like 'the aristocracy', 'the clergy', 'the gentry' and 'the working class', and it very often appears in that kind of list. Grammar note: it can take either a singular or a plural verb — 'the peasantry was heavily taxed' and 'the peasantry were starving' are both found, with the plural more common in British English when you are thinking of the people one by one. A caution about feeling: 'peasant' used of a living person today is an insult, meaning rough and ignorant, and even 'peasantry' can sound as if you are looking down from above. Modern writers often prefer 'small farmers', 'farming families' or 'rural people' when they are describing people alive now.
組成peasant + -ry, an ending that gathers people or things into one whole group — the same -ry as in 'gentry', 'citizenry', 'jewellery', 'machinery'. 'Peasant' itself came into English from Middle English paissaunt, from French, and behind that a Latin word for the surrounding country district.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
peasantrynoun/ˈpɛzəntɹi/
- 1
historicalImpoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.
- They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.
- 2
Ignorant people of the lowest social status; bumpkins, rustics.
- Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the gray-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity.
- 3
The condition of being a peasant; the position, rank, conduct, or quality of a peasant.
- How much low pezantry would then be gleaned / From the true ſeede of honor? And how much honor, / Pickt from the chaffe and ruine of the times / To be new verniſh’d?
- He ſhall be armed at all peeces from the mid-thigh vpward with a faire Sword by his ſide, and his Captaines Colours or Enſigne in his hand, which Colours if they belong to a priuate Captaine ought to bee mixt equally of two ſeuerall colours, that is to ſay (according to the rules of Herauldry) of Colour and Mettall, and not colour on colour, as Greene and Red, or Blacke and Blew, or ſuch like, nor yet mettall on mettall as White and Yellow, or Orangetawny and White: for colours ſo borne, ſhew Baſtardy, peaſantry, or diſhonor.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。