Sharecrops

Part of speech: verb, noun

Definitions

1. Individuals cultivating land they do not own in exchange for a portion of the harvest ; an agricultural arrangement where laborers give landlords part of the crop yield ; a system in which tenants farm rented fields and share the resulting produce with the owners
2. Farmers who work someone else's property and provide a share of crops as rent ; a tenant farming method involving splitting agricultural output with landowners ; a practice where growers do not possess land but receive part of the harvest in return for labor
3. Cultivating land owned by others with compensation through crop division ; a land tenure style based on dividing produce between tillers and proprietors ; agricultural labor performed on non-owned land with returns paid in shares of harvested crops

Etymology: "Sharecrops" is the third-person singular form of the verb "sharecrop," so its history is that of the verb, which is a plain compound of two existing English words: "share," meaning a portion or part of something, and "crop," meaning the produce gathered from a field. Put together, the sense is literal: to farm land and divide the harvest with the landowner. The noun "sharecropper," the person who does the work, follows the same logic, and the practice it names was the arrangement that, in the American South after the Civil War, bound many formerly enslaved and poor white families to landowners through debts charged against their share of the crop. The compound itself is transparent, but its meaning has carried heavy historical weight, which is why the word still appears in discussions of land tenure and economic dependence.

Synonyms: farm on shares, tenant farming