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''manumit'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250725234121-00-⌔

manumit - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Verb

manumit (third-person singular simple present manumits, present participle manumitting, simple past and past participle manumitted)

  • (transitive) To release (someone) from slavery; to free.
    • ✤ Synonyms: emancipate, enfranchise, liberate
    • ✤ […] Lungs, I will manumit thee from the Fornace;/I will reſtore thee thy complexion, Puffe,/Lost in the embers; and repayre this brayne,/Hurt with the fume o’the Mettalls.1
    • ✤ Turn now to the temperance revolution. In it we shall find a stronger bondage broken, a viler slavery manumitted, a greater tyrant deposed; in it, more of want supplied, more disease healed, more sorrow assuaged.2
    • ✤ Persons taken in war were considered at the absolute control of their captors, and were therefore, de facto, slaves; and the children of a female slave followed the condition of their mother, and belonged to her master. But masters could manumit their slaves, who thus became Roman citizens, with some restrictions.3
    • ✤ Ruth wept much but Sara set her beauty to a fierce grimness which, even when, as you shall hear later, she was manumitted, she never entirely lost.4

Etymology

From Middle English manumitten, from Latin manūmittere, from pre-Classical Latin manū ēmittere (literally “send out from one’s hand”).5

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˌmænjʊˈmɪt/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (General American) IPA: /ˌmænjəˈmɪt/
  • Rhymes: -ɪt
  • Hyphenation: man‧u‧mit

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1610 (first performance), Ben[jamin] Jonson, The Alchemist, London: […] Thomas Snodham, for Walter Burre, and are to be sold by Iohn Stepneth, […], published 1612, →OCLC, Act II, scene ii: ↩

  2. 1842 February 22, Abraham Lincoln, “Address Before the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society”, in Arthur Brooks Lapsley, editor, The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln ‎: ↩

  3. 1867, John Lord, The Old Roman World: the Grandeur and Failure of Its Civilization ‎: ↩

  4. 1985, Anthony Burgess, Kingdom of the Wicked, Arbor House Publishing: ↩

  5. “manumit, v.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000. ↩

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Secondary

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