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
Miles Caton, actor: The first time I got the script, they prompted it as a 19-year-old sharecropper who’s a musician, and he would have been Sam Cooke if it was 20 years later.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 17, 2025
“What you thinking, child? Can’t you see you parading ’round with us is telling every scalawag twixt here and Carol-liney, ‘All what stands twixt you and three thousand dollar is this dumb o’ergrowed sharecropper?’
From "The Journey of Little Charlie" by Christopher Paul Curtis
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
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
Hawkins’ “uncle” Larry Gossett, a former Metropolitan King County Council member born in Seattle to two sharecroppers, is a founding member of the coalition, and is the reason Hawkins hasn’t missed but maybe one year.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 15, 2024
It looked to be a good harvest this year, though in the way of sharecroppers, they had to pay off the landowner first.
From "Life Is So Good" by George Dawson
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
