How to Use enslaved in a Sentence

enslaved

1 of 2 adjective
  • Stories where enslaved people are born free and die free.
    — Jesmyn Ward, Vanity Fair, 21 Apr. 2026
  • The codes were so secretive that not all enslaved people knew about them.
    — Carolyn Stein, Chicago Tribune, 5 Feb. 2026
  • The home was likely used as a safe house for enslaved people fleeing the South.
    — Ryan Brennan, Kansas City Star, 13 Feb. 2026
  • Don’t skip the blacksmith shop, once the workspace of an enslaved blacksmith, which hosts demonstrations.
    — Michael Barnes, Austin American Statesman, 6 Nov. 2025
  • Below three magical symbols, the author wrote the names of four enslaved people.
    — Maria Mocerino, Interesting Engineering, 20 June 2026
  • Crop Over’s summer fete is tied to when enslaved people celebrated the end of sugarcane season or the crop was over.
    — Kristin Braswell, Travel + Leisure, 3 Feb. 2026
  • After four years of bloodshed, the Union was preserved and 4 million enslaved people were granted their freedom.
    — Jennifer Murray, The Conversation, 18 Feb. 2026
  • For enslaved people, the Revolution was a fierce campaign to stage the largest exodus out of bondage since biblical times.
    — Literary Hub, 7 Nov. 2025
  • Although Homer does not say so, enslaved women in a royal house would scarcely have had the power to refuse male visitors, even so surly a bunch as the suitors.
    — David Denby, New Yorker, 21 June 2026
  • Because sugar plantations were so large and enslaved populations were so preponderant, whites feared that any tumult would end with their heads on pikes.
    — Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker, 4 May 2026
  • Charles Ware, the logger Blair hoped would clear trees from his land, told him and Benson that the town common had been the site where enslaved people were hanged.
    — Andrea Riquier, USA Today, 10 Aug. 2025
  • Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived at the site, along with enslaved people.
    — Liz Crawford, CBS News, 30 Jan. 2026
  • Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived at the site, along with enslaved people.
    — Liz Crawford, CBS News, 28 Jan. 2026
  • Merchants in fine suits rode in carriages or on sedan chairs while enslaved people lugging carts and crates wore dirty, threadbare clothing and could be publicly whipped or burned to death for misbehavior.
    — Livia Gershon, JSTOR Daily, 9 June 2026
  • And because the plantation owners were distracted by their own celebrations, this was when enslaved people often tried to escape.
    — Stephanie Hunt, Southern Living, 28 Nov. 2025
  • But it was captured by a British privateer and departed for Jamaica, crammed with 442 enslaved people.
    — Lizz Schumer, People.com, 24 Aug. 2025
  • Annis is an enslaved woman, sold south to a Louisiana sugarcane plantation.
    — The Know, Denver Post, 8 Feb. 2026
  • But over the past several decades, scholars have made headway in piecing together the ideas and actions of resistance leaders such as Aponte, as well as of the enslaved themselves.
    — Laurent Dubois, The Atlantic, 6 Jan. 2026
  • Scott suffered from tuberculosis and, at close to 50, he was considered old, especially for an enslaved person.
    — Equal Justice Initiative, USA Today, 6 Nov. 2025
  • Its circling movements once provided cover for enslaved people to slip away undetected, fleeing into palenques (the free Black towns).
    — Essence, 28 Aug. 2025
  • In September, a photo showing an enslaved man's scarred back from whippings was removed from a national monument in Georgia.
    — Aida Mogos, CBS News, 24 Feb. 2026
  • His party included an enslaved man, modeled after York, and a trusty dog, modeled after Lewis’s Newfoundland.
    — Literary Hub, 21 Apr. 2026
  • The home was likely used as a safe house for enslaved people fleeing the South, and the passageway’s design reflects careful planning to keep that purpose hidden from anyone who might come looking.
    — Ryan Brennan, Miami Herald, 13 Feb. 2026
  • In Marx’s terms, enslaved workers actually represent variable capital in the production process.
    — Literary Hub, 22 Sep. 2025
  • Her mother, an enslaved woman whose name is lost to history, had been a storyteller, too, regaling the girl with folktales on the Maryland plantation where she was born in the mid-nineteenth century.
    — April White, JSTOR Daily, 15 Sep. 2025
  • In 1643, Connecticut signed one of the first laws requiring local officials to assist in capturing enslaved runaways.
    — Calista Oetama, Hartford Courant, 22 June 2026
  • Elizabeth Freeman, one of Massachusetts’s 5,000 enslaved people, was among those who decided to take her chance at freedom.
    — New York Times, 22 June 2026
  • By one account, Justice Samuel Nelson’s tuition at Middlebury College was financed in part by his father selling an enslaved girl.
    — Equal Justice Initiative, USA Today, 6 Nov. 2025
  • Djimon Hounsou played Maximus’ right-hand man and closest ally, a Black Numidian man taken from his home as an enslaved gladiator.
    — Brendan Le, PEOPLE, 5 May 2026
  • These excursions also offer access to the upstairs of the Big House, where the former plantation’s owners once lived — after entering through the building’s rear, as an enslaved person would.
    — Catherine Garcia, TheWeek, 21 Apr. 2026

enslaved

2 of 2 noun
  • His flawed heroes fight for the right things while living on the land soaked in the blood of the enslaved.
    — Chris Vognar, Los Angeles Times, 14 May 2025
  • Across the nation, multiple landmarks were built by the enslaved.
    — Rodney Coates, The Conversation, 14 Aug. 2023
  • Many of the enslaved at Brierfield were forced to help build the defenses at Vicksburg, where at least four of them died.
    — Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times, 19 July 2023
  • As for the voices of the enslaved and the dispossessed, the island is unsettlingly silent.
    — Sue Eisenfeld, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 Feb. 2024
  • On plantations, enslavers controlled where and how the enslaved were buried and whether burials could be marked or visited.
    — Joanna Gilmore, The Conversation, 29 Oct. 2025
  • In his speech, Lynch claimed that the secret to controlling the enslaved was pitting them against one another.
    — Anna Deavere Smith, The Atlantic, 13 Nov. 2023
  • Some of the cooks who emerged from these conditions became some of the highest regarded and valued among the enslaved in the regions.
    — Rodney Coates, The Conversation, 14 Aug. 2023
  • After all, one thing workingmen, women, and almost all of the enslaved had in common, on the commons, was the fact that none of them could vote.
    — Zadie Smith, New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2025
  • But when an older man—a fellow slave—seeks to gain favor by preaching the master’s gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own.
    — Sarah Yang, Sunset Magazine, 17 June 2024
  • As many enslaved arrived on The Clotilda at a young age, there are substantial documents that record their lives.
    — Natalie Preddie, Travel + Leisure, 10 Oct. 2023
  • Accounting for them is complicated by the nature of slavery, with the enslaved often buried in unmarked graves.
    — Robert Sullivan, The New Yorker, 4 Sep. 2023
  • There’s language about the responsibilities of the enslaved and of masters in the Bible.
    — Rachel Hatzipanagos, Washington Post, 10 July 2023
  • The west side of the tribute marks the wharf’s historical edge, where a metal marker lists the names of departure and arrival ports of the enslaved.
    — Devon M. Sayers, CNN, 19 June 2023
  • In the eyes of slavers, the enslaved were property, like furniture, to be used and abused, not people, with parents and grandparents and siblings and cousins.
    — Chadd Scott, Forbes.com, 28 Aug. 2025
  • No classic Hollywood film tells the story of plantation life from the point of view of the enslaved—that would have dispelled the myth entirely.
    — Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Time, 21 May 2025
  • General Granger read a proclamation that said that the enslaved were free, but Union troops did not go throughout the area ensuring that all were free.
    — Andrew Stanton, MSNBC Newsweek, 19 June 2025
  • But white families may have other documents — such as wills, plantation records or family Bibles that list the names of the enslaved — or know where to find them.
    — Reuters, NBC News, 27 June 2023
  • The flag is split horizontally with the red arched into the blue, signifying the bloodshed of the enslaved and depicting a new horizon.
    — Joseph Hernandez, Kansas City Star, 18 June 2025
  • Communal gardens, maintained by the enslaved, might supplement the meager supplies and what was available from hunting or fishing.
    — Rodney Coates, The Conversation, 14 Aug. 2023
  • Slaveholders, of course, withheld education from the enslaved, along with nearly everything else.
    — Chadd Scott, Forbes.com, 19 July 2025
  • How did local residents, particularly descendants of both the enslaved and the enslavers, engage with the project?
    — Brianna Scott, NPR, 19 June 2025
  • In one gallery, black walls are inscribed in silver with African names, along with ages – some as young as 4 – while an adjacent gallery similarly lists names imposed upon the enslaved.
    — Devon M. Sayers, CNN, 19 June 2023
  • Although Drake’s couplets were often comedic, Gates’ writing sought to capture the anger that was and is undoubtedly present in the lives of the enslaved and in their descendants.
    — Shantay Robinson, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 Mar. 2023
  • These words seem to situate Truth among the enslaved of the South, a region to which she is never known to have traveled until after the Civil War.
    — Cynthia Greenlee, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 Feb. 2024
  • The pair recently traveled together to Grenada, where their ancestors of slave owners and the enslaved forged a terrible history.
    — Simon Perry, Peoplemag, 15 Nov. 2023
  • By cloaking their gods in the guise of Catholic saints, the enslaved in Cuba could continue to worship as their forebearers in Benin and Congo had done.
    — Helena Alonso Paisley, Miami Herald, 29 Jan. 2024
  • When their recent champion is massacred in the arena, Ashur and Korris head to the docks where the enslaved are held, looking for potential new fighters.
    — Aramide Tinubu, Variety, 1 Dec. 2025
  • Walking along the Lowcountry, Turner interviewed descendants of the enslaved, made careful notes about their dialect and songs, and took photos.
    — Joshua Kagavi, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 Feb. 2024
  • Often, the enslaved lived in complete isolation in wet climates very different from the rest of the United States, separated by rivers, swamps, and waterways.
    — Tanay Howard, Parents, 17 Feb. 2024
  • The wealthiest of France's plantations were in Saint-Domingue, where the enslaved rose up and won independence in 1804 as Haiti.
    — ABC News, 27 May 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'enslaved.' 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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