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slave ~ Slav

[slightly different middle vowel sound: the letter 'a' in 'slave' rhymes with the letters 'ay' in "pay", and the letter 'a' in 'Slav'  rhymes with the letter 'a' in "father"]

“Slave”, as a noun, is ‘a person who is owned by another person and works for no money (bondage labour) and has no choice of his/her own; a person who is very strongly influenced by something or someone that he/she does everything for that thing or person’; as a verb, it is ‘to work very, very hard without rest or without expecting much payment or appreciation in return’,

e.g.

Thousands of people from African continent were brought into the USA by force and were turned into slaves to work on sugar cane fields.

Slaves were not supposed to own anything, including the babies they had given birth to!

She is a slave to fashion; she spends a lot of money and time on the latest designs.

My students have been slaving over their essays for a week now.

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“Slav” (noun & always with a capital ‘s’) is ‘a person belonging to any of the races in Central or Eastern Europe, speaking such languages as Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, etc’,

{Note: the adjective form ‘Slavic’ is more commonly used than the noun form ‘Slav’.}

e.g.

The Slavs with their strong work-mindedness progressed far better than the other races of Europe.

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