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Mercenary   /mˈərsənˌɛri/   Listen
noun
Mercenary  n.  (pl. mercenaries)  One who is hired; a hireling; especially, a soldier hired into foreign service.



adjective
Mercenary  adj.  
1.
Acting for reward; serving for pay; paid; hired; hireling; venal; as, mercenary soldiers.
2.
Hence: Moved primarily by considerations of pay or profit; greedy of gain; sordid; selfish. "For God forbid I should my papers blot With mercenary lines, with servile pen."
Synonyms: See Venal.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mercenary" Quotes from Famous Books



... representatives; the rights of private citizens violated and the titles of all landed property declared void; the voice of complaint stifled by restrictions on the press; and finally, disaffection overawed by the first band of mercenary troops that ever marched on our free soil. For two years our ancestors were kept in sullen submission by that filial love which had invariably secured their allegiance to the mother-country, whether its head chanced to be a Parliament, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... legitimate work in which a Vaisya may engage without fear of censure. The man who abandons his own proper occupation and betakes himself to that of a Sudra, should be considered as a Sudra and on no account should any food be accepted from him. Professors of the healing art, mercenary soldiers, the priest who acts as warder of the house, and persons who devote a whole year to study without any profit, are all to be considered as Sudras. And those who impudently partake of food offered at ceremonials in a Sudra's house are afflicted with a terrible calamity. In consequence of partaking ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... study of military discipline. Hence, during the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, they had that advantage over their neighbours which regular troops always possess over militia. This advantage they lost, when other states began, at a later period, to employ mercenary forces, who were probably as superior to them in the art of war as they had hitherto been to their antagonists.) Each pursuit therefore became first an art, and then a trade. In proportion as the professors of each became more expert in their particular ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... calmly, nor cowardly suffer those who have no claims but their impudence, to storm their fortress and to capture them. They will defend it in all lawful ways.-Bishop and Wolcott, and a thousand other mercenary hirelings may attempt to subdue or terrify them—a proud and haughty leader who under the guise of patriotism, is attempting to undermine the happiness of the best regulated and freest State in the Union, with a thousand sycophants, conspiring to bring ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast

... of Art and Music is to add those beauties, by expression and the power of memory, to the self. Thus we may grow more beautiful, just as surely as by thinking ever in terms of pounds, shillings, and pence, we grow more sordid and mercenary. It is a perfectly commonsense process. Furthermore, the appreciation of beauty and of artistic expression develops our power of keener appreciation. Evolution in music cannot stop, for spirit is behind it: and the spirit within must eventually find its ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt


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