sharecropper
Americannoun
-
sharecroppers
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of sharecropper
Explanation
A sharecropper is a tenant farmer, someone who works land that's rented from its owner. Typically, a sharecropper will pay the landowner with part of the harvest, rather than money. The word sharecropper, an American invention from the 1880s, comes from the fact that these farmers would share their crops in return for the use of the land. This system became widespread in the southern states of the US after the Civil War, and it was in large part influenced by the end of slavery. There were both black and white sharecroppers well into the 1950s.
Vocabulary lists containing sharecropper
American History I
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March: Book One
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Just Mercy
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Civil rights activist and former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer was weary when she spoke alongside Malcolm X at a church in Harlem in December 1964.
From Salon ● May 28, 2026
“My grandmother was a sharecropper in Arkansas, and I know that this is the same thing,” a man shouts at one point as whistles shrill and a handheld siren wails.
From Slate ● Feb. 11, 2026
Mr. Morrison’s, meanwhile, is on the porch of a Mississippi Delta sharecropper.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 26, 2025
Delia Pettway Thibodeaux is a third-generation Gee’s Bend quilter whose grandmother was a sharecropper and whose bold, rhythmic quilts are now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection.
From Seattle Times ● May 10, 2024
Like the year before, we had spent the summer months picking strawberries for Ito, the Japanese sharecropper.
From "The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child" by Francisco Jiménez
Duncan was born Ruby Lee Phillips on June 7, 1932, near Tallulah, La., where her parents, Ida Bolden and Joseph Phillips, were sharecroppers on a white-owned plantation.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 5, 2026
"I come from a proud line of sharecroppers and cowboys. My grandfather was buried in his cowboy boots," she shares.
From BBC ● Mar. 1, 2024
Lewis was born in 1940 as one of 10 children of Alabama sharecroppers and rose to become an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and a lion of the U.S.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 26, 2024
His parents, Lemius and Eunice Sonnier, were sharecroppers, and young Joel and his older brother, P.J., picked cotton alongside them from an early age.
From New York Times ● Jan. 26, 2024
His parents had been sharecroppers who moved north and became a machinist and a nurse.
From "Class Matters" by The New York Times
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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
