"hewers of wood and drawers of water" meaning in English

See hewers of wood and drawers of water in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: A biblical term, first mentioned in Joshua 9:21. Head templates: {{en-noun|p}} hewers of wood and drawers of water pl (plural only)
  1. Those who drudge, or are made to work hard; those who do menial or servile work at the behest of others; physical labourers. Wikipedia link: Book of Joshua Tags: plural, plural-only
    Sense id: en-hewers_of_wood_and_drawers_of_water-en-noun-4t7-67Ab Categories (other): English coordinated pairs, English entries with incorrect language header, English pluralia tantum

Download JSON data for hewers of wood and drawers of water meaning in English (1.4kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "A biblical term, first mentioned in Joshua 9:21.",
  "head_templates": [
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      "args": {
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      "expansion": "hewers of wood and drawers of water pl (plural only)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English coordinated pairs",
          "parents": [
            "Coordinated pairs",
            "Terms by etymology"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
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          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
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            "Entry maintenance"
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        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English pluralia tantum",
          "parents": [
            "Pluralia tantum",
            "Nouns",
            "Lemmas"
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        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1991, Martin Ohaeri Ijere, Women in Nigerian Economy, page 41",
          "text": "All these groups are among the hewers of wood and drawers of water whom Marx assured that they would have nothing but their chains to lose if they rose against their oppressors.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Those who drudge, or are made to work hard; those who do menial or servile work at the behest of others; physical labourers."
      ],
      "id": "en-hewers_of_wood_and_drawers_of_water-en-noun-4t7-67Ab",
      "links": [
        [
          "drudge",
          "drudge"
        ],
        [
          "menial",
          "menial"
        ],
        [
          "servile",
          "servile"
        ],
        [
          "behest",
          "behest"
        ],
        [
          "physical",
          "physical"
        ],
        [
          "labourer",
          "labourer"
        ]
      ],
      "tags": [
        "plural",
        "plural-only"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Book of Joshua"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "hewers of wood and drawers of water"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "A biblical term, first mentioned in Joshua 9:21.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "p"
      },
      "expansion": "hewers of wood and drawers of water pl (plural only)",
      "name": "en-noun"
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  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
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        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English idioms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English pluralia tantum",
        "English terms derived from the Bible",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1991, Martin Ohaeri Ijere, Women in Nigerian Economy, page 41",
          "text": "All these groups are among the hewers of wood and drawers of water whom Marx assured that they would have nothing but their chains to lose if they rose against their oppressors.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Those who drudge, or are made to work hard; those who do menial or servile work at the behest of others; physical labourers."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "drudge",
          "drudge"
        ],
        [
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        ],
        [
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          "servile"
        ],
        [
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          "behest"
        ],
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      ],
      "tags": [
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      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Book of Joshua"
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  ],
  "word": "hewers of wood and drawers of water"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-30 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (210104c and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.