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🪴 A plant container 🏡 A plantation owner 🌱 A seed sower
planter

planter

7 6.4
A person who owns or manages a large farm often growing crops like cotton
  • noun
  • /ˈplæntər/
translation icon : terrateniente
  • It used to belong to a planter.
  • planters and merchants
  • planter elite
  • antebellum planter

They were soon to go home, Southern planters, sons.

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Examples

  • We are engaged in a great struggle with the sugar planters here.

    Hawaii (1966)

  • I'm just a bloody tea planter.

    The Sea Wolves (1980)

  • -To the biggest cotton planter--

    Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

  • On the same island, there was also this ruined planter who had lost virtually everything.

    Fiction book (1993)

  • Your first figure is an old white man, probably a former planter who's lost everything.

  • For the benefit of an ignorant planter, what does that mean?

    In Harm's Way (1965)

  • Seems to me some of you planters should go in for politics, and rather quickly.

    Island in the Sun (1957)

  • The agricultural system was structured by lien laws that gave planters control over the crops grown on their land.

    Academic text (2017)

  • Faced with a labor shortage, planters requested the importation of cheap labor from India.

    Academic text (1994)

  • The wealthy rice planter oversaw the harvest with great care and attention.

Synonyms

farmer
vsplanter
898 1.0

A person who grows crops or raises animals on a farm

is specific to southern or colonial large estate contexts rather than general farms
grower
vsplanter
87 2.6

A person who raises plants or crops to sell

emphasizes ownership and large estate context instead of only cultivation
landowner
vsplanter
42 2.5

A person who has land, often a large area in the countryside

focuses on agricultural management in southern or colonial estate settings
plantation owner
vsplanter
4 3.9

A person who owns a large farm that grows crops like sugar or cotton

is tied to people in southern or colonial agricultural contexts
landholder
vsplanter
2 4.1

A person who owns property like a farm or house

is about owning and running large agricultural estates rather than mere possession
culturist
vsplanter
6.0

A person who grows plants or crops on land

is rooted in managing large agricultural estates rather than horticultural practice

How Wealthy

magnate
22 7.9
landowner
42 2.5
planter
7 6.4
smallholder
  • UK
1 5.8
sharecropper
  • Archaic
14 8.4

Surface Forms

planter singular
planters plural

Morphology

planter = plant (opaque) = plant + er

Although historically related to someone who plants, the specialized sense of a plantation owner or manager is not directly recoverable from the parts.

Etymology

Planter comes from plant plus the ending -er and is linked to plantation, which means 'a large area for growing crops'. Historically a planter was someone who owned or managed a plantation, so the word came to mean a landowner in that context.