Servant

How to spell servant

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce servant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does servant mean?

1. nounA person employed to perform domestic duties or to attend to another person.

Servant in a sentence

• The household kept a single servant to manage the cooking and cleaning.

• In the old estate, every servant had a clearly defined set of duties.

Where does servant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin verb servire, meaning 'to serve' or 'to be a slave to', which was itself built on servus, the Latin word for a slave or bondsman. In Old French this became servir, and its present participle servant literally meant 'serving' or 'one who is serving'. English borrowed the form in the late 1100s and 1200s, originally for a personal or household attendant rather than a hired worker in the modern sense. The same servire root still powers a large family of English words, including 'serve', 'service', 'servile' and 'sergeant', so the steady serv- stem is a reliable anchor for the spelling. The likely trap is the ending: it is written -ant (the agent spelling inherited from the French participle), not the more familiar -ent, so think of it as 'one who serves'.

How the word is built

• serv- (from Latin servire, to serve)
• -ant (agent suffix: one who does)