chattel
[chat-l]
- Law. Often chattels. a movable article of personal property.
- Often chattels. any article of tangible property other than land, buildings, and other things annexed to land.
- a slave.
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Origin of chattel
Synonym study
1. See property.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
Examples from the Web for chattel
Contemporary Examples
Maybe no one will be the “husband” (as in, animal husbandry) and no one the chattel.
Until 1865—less than 150 years ago—it was legal under the United States Constitution to own black people as chattel.
Likely because of his own faith, Carter tries—and fails—to excuse the biblical mandate for reducing women to chattel.
Within a century, chattel slavery ceased to exist in virtually every modern nation.
Men, women, and children are stripped naked and inspected like chattel, and later, lynched with impunity.
‘12 Years a Slave,’ Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender, Is MesmerizingMarlow Stern
August 31, 2013
Historical Examples
Your chattel is for growing corn, not for corn in a hog's belly.
DustMr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
All this while he had been led about as a creature without a will, a chattel, an instrument.
The Promised LandMary Antin
What, then, is chattel slavery as understood in American law?
Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible?Isaac Allen
Ruth 4:10, "Ruth the Moabitess have I purchased this day to be my wife;" was she a chattel?
Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible?Isaac Allen
Here there is a manifest contradiction of the conditions of a chattel slave.
Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible?Isaac Allen
chattel
- (often plural) property law
- chattel personalan item of movable personal property, such as furniture, domestic animals, etc
- chattel realan interest in land less than a freehold, such as a lease
- goods and chattels personal property
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Word Origin
C13: from Old French chatel personal property, from Medieval Latin capitāle wealth; see capital 1
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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Word Origin and History for chattel
n.
early 13c., chatel "property, goods," from Old French chatel "chattels, goods, wealth, possessions, property; profit; cattle," from Late Latin capitale "property" (see cattle, which is the Old North French form of the same word). Application to slaves (1640s) is a rhetorical figure of abolitionists, etc.
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Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper