Coloni

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Members of an ancient Roman social class who lived on rural estate lands ; agricultural tenants or laborers working the land under certain conditions ; settlers or inhabitants engaged in cultivation and farming in a defined community
2. Individuals tied to Roman landholding systems who cultivated farms ; rural dwellers dependent on landowners for tenancy rights ; persons established in agricultural households with specific legal statuses
3. Tenant farmers or rural workers bound to landowners in Roman times ; members of a class associated with farming estates ; inhabitants of countryside settlements involved in cultivation and tillage

Etymology: "Coloni" is the plural of "colonus", a Latin noun for a tenant who worked land belonging to someone else, most often in the Roman Empire, paying rent in produce or labour rather than owning the land outright. The Latin word is built on "colere", "to till, cultivate, inhabit, or worship", a verb that also gave us words for cultivating the soil and for living in a place. The tenant's name is thus tied to the act of working the ground, not to any idea of ownership. English borrowed the singular "colonus" directly from Latin, and the plural form appears when English writers discuss the social class itself, as historians of the late Roman economy do when describing the groups of dependent farmers bound to their estates. The same root gave English "colony", a settlement of people who take up residence and cultivate a new territory, which shows how closely the idea of tilling land and settling it were linked in Latin thought.

Synonyms: colonists, settlers, pioneers, inhabitants

Antonyms: indigenous, natives