seigneur
Americannoun
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a lord, especially a feudal lord.
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(in French Canada) a holder of a seigneury.
noun
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a feudal lord, esp in France
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(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
Voltaire soon afterwards purchased a third estate at Ferney, just a little over the French border, and here, eventually, he lived en grande seigneur, and was known as the “patriarch of Ferney.”
From Voltaire: A Sketch of his Life and Works by Foote, G. W. (George William)
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
Given their belief in an imperial France whose seigneurs were Cezanne, Matisse and Gaugin, Fry and Bell preferred any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid, to anything else, however strong.
From Time Magazine Archive
But to tourists' eyes, at least, the country of the seigneurs still looked the same.
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
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.
