latifundium means A great landed estate with absentee ownership and labor often in a state of partial servitude. It carries an Arena rating of 1509, earned across 69 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, latifundium ranks #602 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #794 of 17,128 for Most Ponderous Words, #1,043 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words, #1,641 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words.
Why “latifundium” is a great word
LATIFUNDIUM — [Noun] A large landed estate or plantation, historically characterized by absentee ownership and the employment of laborers in a state of servitude. From Latin lātifundium, from lātus ("wide, extensive") + fundus ("ground, base, estate, farm"). Unlike a "hacienda," rooted in the colonial landscapes of the Americas, or a "smallholding," implying a family's self-sufficient plot, a latifundium is an empire of soil, an abstraction of ownership measured in leagues. It is the sun-bleached horizon broken only by identical rows of olive trees; the ledger in a distant city tallying harvests from fields never walked; the geometric oppression where land is not a home but a calculation of yield. It is the ancient shape of power written upon the earth, a monument to the cold calculus of extraction.
Etymology
From Latin lātifundium, from lātus (“wide, extensive”) + fundus (“ground, base, estate, farm”). Doublet of latifundio.
noun
- A great landed estate with absentee ownership and labor often in a state of partial servitude.e.g.“The conclusive military victory of Philip V left the grandees stranded, still rich and still powerful on their latifundia, but stripped of the ‘aristocratic republicanism’ they had previously enjoyed.” — 2007, Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory, Penguin, published 2008, page 251:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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