slave dealer
1
9.9
- noun
- /sleɪv ˈdiːlər/
- NSFW
:
traficante de esclavos
- In the 19th century, many cities had numerous slave dealers who profited from the suffering of others.
Examples
-
In later letters, Trowbridge referred to the slaves he purchased and then sold to a man named Theodore Johnston, a slave dealer in the New Orleans market.
Academic text (2009) -
That's a decision that the government should stay out of? It's between her and her slave dealer.
Blog text (31) -
Sponsored by the Lances, a junior men's leadership society, slave dealers exhibited and auctioned women students to raise money for a men's scholarship fund throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Academic text (2005) -
The infamous slave dealer auctioned off enslaved people at the market every week.
-
Historically, a slave dealer would often travel to different regions to buy and sell enslaved individuals.
Synonyms
11
9.6
A person who buys and sells people as slaves
10
9.1
A person who buys and sells people as slaves
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and transparently built from 'slave' (enslaved person) plus 'dealer' (someone who buys and sells goods), yielding someone who trades in enslaved people. This is a straightforward noun–noun compound following common compositional patterns (and similar in many languages), so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will infer the meaning.
Etymology
The term slave dealer comes from a harsh market image: a dealer is a person who buys and sells goods, and a slave was a person forced to work for someone else. So a slave dealer was someone who bought and sold people, which is why the term means 'a person who trades enslaved people'.