Peon
From Freepedia
The words peon and peonage are derived from the Spanish peón.
Spanish usage
In its obsolete Spanish usage, the word denoted a person who traveled by foot rather than on a horse (caballero). It now means a chess pawn.
In Spanish-speaking countries, especially those in Latin America, where the hacienda system kept labourers from leaving estates, peon has a range of meanings related to unskilled or semi-skilled work or manual labour, whether referring to a low-status wage earner in a variety of rural and urban industries (especially a day labourer or a servant); a peasant; a bullfighter's assistant, or, historically, someone subject to forms of unfree labour.
English usage
The derived English usages of the words peon have a variety of related and added meanings.
In the United States, in a historical and legal sense, peon generally only had the meaning of someone working in an unfree labor system (known as peonage). The word often implied debt bondage or indentured servitude.
More generally, in the English-speaking world, the term is used colloquially to mean any employee or soldier with little authority, often assigned unskilled or drudgerous tasks—an underling. In this sense, peon can be used in either a derogatory or self-effacing context.
In South Asian English, a peon is usually an office boy, an attendant, or an orderly, a person kept around for odd jobs (and, historically, a policeman or foot soldier). It is also strongly derogatory. In an unrelated South Asian sense, "peon" may also be an alternative spelling for the poon tree (genus Calophyllum) or its wood, especially when used in boat-building.
In computing slang, a peon is an "unprivileged user"—a person without special privileges on a computer system. The opposite is a "superuser."
