Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

vassal

UK/ˈvæsəl/US/ˈvæsəl/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,389 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: vassals

A vassal was a lord who held land in return for loyalty to a greater lord. A vassal of the king, swear as a vassal, vassal states.

The bargain was land for military service, sworn in a ceremony of homage, and it was the frame of medieval politics — a man could be vassal to two lords and face an awkward war. A vassal state today is one controlled by a stronger power.

Myrabella · Public domain

Definitions of vassal

  1. 1nounvassalA lord who held land in return for loyalty to a greater lord.C1

    “Each vassal knelt before the king and swore to serve him loyally in war.”

vassal is a lord.

Where it comes from

Medieval Latin vassallus comes from vassus, a servant, from a Celtic word for a young man or retainer.

  1. Proto-Celtic

    *wastos — servant

  2. cel-gau

    *wassos — young man, squire

  3. Latin

    vassus — servant

  4. Medieval Latin

    vassallus — manservant, domestic, retainer

  5. Old French

    vassal

  6. Middle English

    vassal

  7. English, today

    vassal

From Middle English vassal, from Old French vassal, from Medieval Latin vassallus (“manservant, domestic, retainer”), from Latin vassus (“servant”), from cel-gau wassos (“young man, squire”), from Proto-Celtic wastos (“servant”) (compare Old Irish foss and Welsh gwas).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in History & Eras

Practise this word

vassal in the wild

  • While the subordinate party is called a vassal, the dominant party is called a suzerain.

    Vassal

  • A vassal state is any state that has varying degrees of influence, but is obligated to a superior state or empire.

    Vassal state

  • A vavasour was the vassal or tenant of a baron, one who held his tenancy under a baron, and who also had tenants under him.

    Vavasour

  • Where the subordinate polity is called a vassal, vassal state or tributary state, the dominant party is called the suzerain.

    Suzerainty

  • In practice, Bulgaria's status as an Ottoman vassal was a legal fiction, and Bulgaria only acknowledged the authority of the Sublime Porte in a formal way.

    Principality of Bulgaria

1 / 3

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.