Farmhands

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A worker who assists in daily agricultural operations, typically performing manual labor such as planting, harvesting, or tending to livestock
2. An individual employed on a farm to help with various tasks, including crop cultivation, animal care, and equipment maintenance
3. Someone who contributes to farming activities by executing tasks related to labor-intensive chores, supporting agricultural production alongside farmers

Etymology: Farmhands is simply the plural of "farmhand," a compound of "farm" and "hand," with "hand" used in its old sense of a worker or laborer, as in "deckhand" or "ranch hand." The pairing is about as plain as English compounds get, so the interest lies less in the parts than in where the word went next. The sense that surprises most readers comes from baseball. A "farm team" is a minor-league club that develops players for a major-league parent, and the players on those teams were nicknamed "farm hands." The nickname carried a dig: it played into the era's habit of slighting someone by calling them a hayseed, a country bumpkin. A player sent down to the farm was, in that slang, a rube from the fields rather than a polished big-city professional.

Synonyms: laborers, workers, hands, fieldworkers