1. a farmer who works land owned by someone else and pays rent with a share of the crop produced
Usage: historical; primarily associated with the post-Civil War American South

Examples

• Many former slaves became sharecroppers after the Civil War.
• The sharecropper gave half his cotton harvest to the landowner as rent.
• Life as a sharecropper was difficult, with families often struggling to make ends meet.
• The sharecropping system kept many farmers in poverty for generations.
• My great-grandfather was a sharecropper in Mississippi during the 1920s.
• Sharecroppers had little control over what crops they could plant.
• The documentary explored how sharecroppers were often exploited by landowners.