Definition

1. Noun:
   • Peasant, tiller, cultivator: A person who works on the land, especially one who owns or rents a small plot for farming. This term is now considered somewhat dated or literary in modern Vietnamese.

Usage Examples

• Noun:
  • Đời sống của dân cày ngày xưa rất vất vả. (The life of peasants in the old days was very hard.)
  • Cuốn tiểu thuyết mô tả cuộc đấu tranh của dân cày. (The novel describes the struggle of the tillers.)

Advanced Usage

• The term dân cày often carries a historical or socio-economic connotation, referring to the agricultural class in pre-modern or feudal societies. It is less commonly used in contemporary everyday speech than the more general term nông dân (farmer).
  • Trong xã hội phong kiến, dân cày là tầng lớp đông đảo nhất. (In feudal society, peasants were the most numerous class.)

Variants and Related Words

• Nông dân (n): Farmer. This is the standard, modern term for a person engaged in agriculture.
  • Nông dân đang thu hoạch lúa. (The farmers are harvesting rice.)
• Tiểu nông (n): Smallholder, small-scale farmer.
  • Những hộ tiểu nông thường canh tác trên mảnh đất nhỏ. (Smallholders usually farm on small plots of land.)

Synonyms

• Nông dân: Farmer.
• Người làm ruộng: Rice cultivator, person who works the fields.

Related Phrases

• Thân phận dân cày: The lot/status of a peasant.
  • Tác phẩm nói về thân phận dân cày nghèo khổ. (The work talks about the destitute lot of the peasantry.)

Related Idioms

• While there are no direct idioms using dân cày, the concept is central to many Vietnamese proverbs about farming and social structure, such as:
  • Nhất sĩ, nhì nông, hết gạo chạy rông, nhất nông, nhì sĩ. (First the scholar, second the farmer; when the rice runs out, you run around. First the farmer, second the scholar.) This proverb highlights the historical importance of the farming class.

1. (cũ) Tiller