Word family noun servant serve server service disservice the services serving servery servicing servility servitude adjective serviceable servile serving verb serve service
From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishservantser‧vant /ˈsɜːvənt $ ˈsɜːr-/ ●●○ noun [countable] 1 BOsomeone, especially in the past, who was paid to clean someone’s house, cook for them, answer the door etc, and who often lived in the house Many young girls became domestic servants.2 → servant of somebody/something → civil servantExamples from the Corpus
servant• His servant hastened to make all ready, build fires and heat water for the baths and prepare food.• To be this man's servant - what was there to be proud in that?• Even with the furnace on, he had the servants put coal in the grates of most of the rooms.• Is he master of this universe or the servant of its masters?• The servant was frightened and ran away.domestic servants• In Oxford, out of 312 boys, 119 became errand lads, while 110 girls out of 223 became domestic servants.• Swift, Richardson, Fielding, and others, fasten upon the conflicts between domestic servants and their masters.• Edinburgh had practically no textile workers, men or women; but as we have seen it had a great many domestic servants.• For most domestic servants though, the occupation was a temporary life-cycle one.• Presumably the decline of domestic servants to launder the disgusting handkerchiefs.• The lot of domestic servants in the eighteenth century was in general less difficult than that of farm-workers.• It also contained an immense number of domestic servants and other members of royal, baronial and ecclesiastical households.Origin servant (1100-1200) Old French present participle of servir; → SERVE1 