seigneur
Americannoun
-
seigneurs
plural
-
a lord, especially a feudal lord.
-
(in French Canada) a holder of a seigneury.
noun
-
a feudal lord, esp in France
-
(in French Canada, until 1854) the landlord of an estate that was subdivided among peasants who held their plots by a form of feudal tenure
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of seigneur
1585–95; < French < Vulgar Latin *senior lord. See senior
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:
So I could not have been more thrilled when #MeToo ripped away the curtain on the murky transgressions and diminishments that women had endured in the droit du seigneur era.
From New York Times ● May 2, 2020
But the way the campaign played out, with the release of the tape, it was almost as if people were talking about droit du seigneur all over again.
From New York Times ● Nov. 25, 2016
He is interrupted by the arrival of Figaro and a group of peasants praising him for abolishing the droit de seigneur.
From The Guardian ● Aug. 14, 2012
This new cinema will be cut and pasted together in a world beyond copyright, where droit d'auteur will soon seem as medieval as droit du seigneur.
From The Guardian ● Jul. 12, 2011
Several times already his turn had come and Touquet had said to him,— "Whenever you wish, seigneur bachelor."
From The Barber of Paris by Charles Paul de Kock
His was an age of hierarchy, in which inequalities of rank seemed to separate seigneurs and servants into separate species, and Montaigne is not free of this attitude; nonetheless, he is curious.
From The Guardian ● Feb. 10, 2012
In the calmer Charleville streets of Rimbaud's boyhood district, swans cruised nonchalantly like grand seigneurs inspecting their expanded watery estates.
From Time Magazine Archive
Trouble was, the Moscow meet was organized by the Amateur Athletic Union, a collection of solemn sports buffs who run U.S. amateur athletics with all the imagination of benighted medieval seigneurs.
From Time Magazine Archive
But to tourists' eyes, at least, the country of the seigneurs still looked the same.
From Time Magazine Archive
He and I started back across the fields, preceding the others like two seigneurs.
From "A Separate Peace" by John Knowles
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
