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• slavey
  slavey

  noun

  a female servant, especially a maid of all work in a boardinghouse.
• Slavey
  Slavey

  noun

  a member of a group of Athabascan-speaking First Nations living in the upper Mackenzie River valley region of the Northwest Territories and in parts of British Columbia, Alberta, and the Yukon Territory.

slavey

¹ American  

[sley-vee] / ˈsleɪ vi /

noun

British Informal: Older Use.

slaveys plural

1. a female servant, especially a maid of all work in a boardinghouse.

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Slavey ² American  

[sley-vee] / ˈsleɪ vi /

noun

Slaveys, plural Slavey plural

1. a member of a group of Athabascan-speaking First Nations living in the upper Mackenzie River valley region of the Northwest Territories and in parts of British Columbia, Alberta, and the Yukon Territory.

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Slavey ¹ British  

/ ˈsleɪvɪ /

noun

1. a member of a Dene Native Canadian people of northern Canada

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slavey ² British  

/ ˈsleɪvɪ /

noun

1. informal a female general servant

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• Slavey
  plural
• Slaveys
  plural
• slaveys
  plural

Etymology

Origin of slavey¹

First recorded in 1800–10; slave + -y ²

Origin of Slavey²

First recorded in 1785–80; from French esclave, literally, “slave,” a loan translation of Cree awahkān “captive, slave” (the Cree would make raids on and enslave this Athabascan people); the two-syllable pronunciation is a local variant derived from a spelling with the French suffix -ais

Example Sentences

Actress Julie Haydon plays radiantly as the simple-hearted slavey, makes the Canon's conversion entirely credible.

From Time Magazine Archive

Kim pretends to be a cockney slavey only to get this beguiling if hokey mystery-comedy off to a start.

From Time Magazine Archive

At 25, with an ailing husband to support, tiny Mrs. Gilmer was a women's-page slavey on the New Orleans Picayune, where she had started at $5 a week.

From Time Magazine Archive

To each other, the young man and the slavey become as beautiful as makeup artists can manage.

From Time Magazine Archive

At present her conversation was restricted to the man who bought her pictures, and the hard-worked, lodging-house slavey on the not too numerous occasions when she brought up the coals.

From The Triumph of Jill by Young, F.E. Mills