dwarf-holder

English

Alternative forms

• dwarfholder, dwarf holder

Etymology

From dwarf +‎ holder, by analogy with smallholder. First attested in the 1930s.

Noun

dwarf-holder (plural dwarf-holders)

1. A poor farmer with a very small holding, especially one smaller than required for subsistence.
   • 1956, Carlile Aylmer Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945, volume 1, page 122:

     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.

   • 1987, Richard J. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria, →ISBN, page 89:

     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.

   • 2001, David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe, →ISBN, page 282:

     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.

Hypernyms

• smallholder (farmer)

Translations

farmer with very small holding

• Hungarian: törpebirtokos (hu)