A type of patriarchal social unit traditional to (agricultural) Serbians and other southern Slavic peoples, originally comprising an extended family group which worked the land and lived communally round the main house; the customs and rules associated with this type of unit.
1887
The Slavs know nothing of private property,—the land being held in common under the care of the vladika or stareshina, as in the Servian xadrugas at the present day.
Encyclopædia Britannicavol. XXII. 146/2
1900
The old system of Zadruga, or communal village based upon the family.
‘Odysseus’, Turkey in Europe viii. 375
1911
The basis of the Serb organisation is the family, either in its narrowest sense of blood-relationship, in communistic organisation, or other individuals grouped together for common work and with common possessions. These forms are called ‘Zadruga’.
Prince Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, Servian People i. 39
1934
Zadruga in Serbia means a big family where brothers and sisters..lead a community life, under the leadership usually of the eldest member of the family.
New York Times 24 June iv. 3/4
1943
From their Russian homeland the Slavs brought a democratic institution called zadruga, a clan or family cooperative, which some of the tribes tried to extend and adjust to the wider forms of government necessary in their new homelands.
L. Adamic, My Native Land (ed. 3) 214
1943
They lived in their primitive villages and held onto their Old-Slavic zadrugé and ‘heart culture’—decency, friendliness, hospitality.
L. Adamic, My Native Land (ed. 3) 216
1963
The dvor or peasant household..is the same elastic unit which was familiar in medieval Europe, and survives today in the zadruge of the Balkans.
Times Literary Supplement 25 January 49/3
1979
The old customary Slavonic ‘family’ law, the zadruga.
International Journal Sociol. of Lawvol. 7 270
1980
People tended to live in large, multi~generational households,..from the ‘joint family’ in India to the ‘zadruga’ in the Balkans.
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
Plural zadrugas, zadruge. Also with capital initial.
Frequency
zadruga typically occurs about 0.05 times per million words in modern written English.
zadruga is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zadruga, n., 1880–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1880
0.011
1890
0.012
1900
0.015
1910
0.021
1920
0.033
1930
0.045
1940
0.056
1950
0.064
1960
0.066
1970
0.066
1980
0.062
1990
0.056
2000
0.048
2010
0.039
zadruga, n. was first published in 1986; not fully revised.