How to Use chattel in a Sentence

chattel

noun
  • The game is the system that keeps one as chattel for the other.
    — Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY, 26 Dec. 2024
  • Well, so too might those women who were forced against their will to function as breeding chattel.
    — Jennifer Wright, Harper's BAZAAR, 13 Apr. 2018
  • Still others say they have been bought and sold as chattel in a thriving, modern-day slave trade.
    — Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, 25 Apr. 2017
  • Men were masters over their women, their chattel, and their emotions.
    — Rob Wolfe, The Atlantic, 5 June 2026
  • These are human beings, not chattel.
    — Mark Lazerus, New York Times, 6 Mar. 2026
  • Pulido was certainly enslaved, but not as chattel who could be bought and sold.
    — Vicente Rafael, The Atlantic, 31 May 2017
  • These days reporters in Syria are walking chattel, to be bought and sold.
    — Janine Di Giovanni, Vogue, 11 May 2016
  • The insidiousness of chattel slavery, though, was still part of his life.
    — NBC News, 13 Feb. 2020
  • Give salmon a chance to outsmart the net in the open ocean, instead of living an aquacultural-chattel life.
    — Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, 28 Nov. 2016
  • Instead, Twitty’s work demands that visitors look the specter of chattel slavery in the eye.
    — San Francisco Chronicle, 20 Sep. 2019
  • So human chattel became a big export for Virginia, Kimball said.
    — Gregory S. Schneider, Washington Post, 26 July 2024
  • Will robots fashioned to look like us, and programmed to accede to our wishes, spur people to think of them as friends and co-workers—or to treat them like chattel?
    — Sue Halpern, The New Yorker, 26 July 2023
  • Harry, whose proper name was Henry, spent 19 years as Fordham’s chattel.
    — Eugene Robinson, The Atlantic, 3 Feb. 2026
  • Baltimore, a major port and shipbuilding center, was a pioneer in the coastal trade of human chattel.
    — Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun, 5 May 2022
  • It was deployed to help justify colonial rule in Africa and chattel slavery in America.
    — Amanda Kolson Hurley, WIRED, 20 Mar. 2018
  • Those power dynamics continue to ebb and flow, but never again will content creators be treated as the chattel of the content owners.
    — Bruce Ramer, The Hollywood Reporter, 9 Aug. 2020
  • Silver coins found previously in the area have mostly been Arab dirhams, used by Muslim merchants to pay for human chattel.
    — New York Times, 12 July 2021
  • These circumlocutions are meant to emphasize the fact that Africans traded like chattel were not, in their essence, slaves but human beings.
    — Lionel Shriver, Harper's magazine, 25 Nov. 2019
  • But like millions of black people whose ancestors were taken from Africa, chattel slavery left her with a history that can never fully be known.
    — Cara Kelly, USA TODAY, 23 Dec. 2019
  • The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and killed — and France never formally did away with it.
    — ABC News, 27 May 2026
  • In these experiments on human chattel, Sims developed a technique to repair fistula, the first of its kind.
    — Daniela Blei, The Atlantic, 8 Mar. 2018
  • Some slave owners used the peach harvest as a kind of festival for their chattel, and runaways provisioned their secret journeys in untended orchards.
    — William Thomas Okie, Smithsonian, 14 Aug. 2017
  • Bradley was a slave, and at the time, the law considered slaves to be chattel—all of their physical and intellectual labor legally belonged to their owners.
    — Erin Blakemore, National Geographic, 1 May 2017
  • The rebellion collapsed by 1865, and with it the institution of chattel slavery.
    — Kevin Waite, The New Republic, 19 Aug. 2019
  • The federal government offered to pay slave owners close to market rates for each of their human chattel, thereby bring slavery to an end without a resort to armed conflict.
    — William Darity, Rolling Stone, 19 June 2021
  • In the past three years, three states have changed their divorce statutes to treat pets more as family members than as mere chattel to be divided by couples, like sofas and TVs.
    — Melissa Chan, Time, 22 Jan. 2020
  • Campbell’s freeing of two Black men appeared in a Carroll County chattel and bond book in 1864.
    — Mary Ann Ashcraft, Baltimore Sun, 8 Feb. 2024
  • This led to the development of a particular type of housing structure known as chattel houses in countries such as Barbados.
    — Farah Nibbs, The Conversation, 22 Oct. 2024
  • When the story begins, Poornima’s mother has just died and her father, who treats her as chattel, is desperate to marry the 16-year-old off.
    — Ann Levin, USA TODAY, 13 Mar. 2018
  • To survive, Furiosa escapes her would-be molester by obscuring her identity and joining the ranks of the Citadel’s chattel workers.
    — Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 15 May 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'chattel.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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