dwarf-holder
nounEtymology From dwarf + holder, by analogy with smallholder. First attested in the 1930s.
1
A poor farmer with a very small holding, especially one smaller than required for subsistence.
- It represented the rural middle classes against the bigger men, especially against their creditors, but it neither represented nor cared for the dwarf-holders, still less the agricultural labourers.1956, Carlile Aylmer Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945, volume 1, page 122:
- The fund would consist of land confiscated from all owners, individual and institutional, who, according to the new bill, held more than was socially acceptable; the confiscated land would be redistributed amongst the landless and the dwarf-holders.1987, Richard J. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria, →ISBN, page 89:
1 more example
- This was a time of land hunger and severely declining living standards for the teeming mass of smallholders, cottagers, and landless laborers who crowded onto the land. The world of the Halesowen dwarf-holders was terrible.2001, David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe, →ISBN, page 282:
- Hypernyms
- smallholder