PROSTITUTE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Prostitute

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/prˈɑstətˌut/ Listen

noun

Prostitute n.

A woman giver to indiscriminate lewdness; a strumpet; a harlot.

A base hireling; a mercenary; one who offers himself to infamous employments for hire. "No hireling she, no prostitute to praise."

verb

Prostitute v. t. (past & past part. prostituted; pres. part. prostituting)

To offer, as a woman, to a lewd use; to give up to lewdness for hire. "Do not prostitute thy daughter."

To devote to base or unworthy purposes; to give up to low or indiscriminate use; as, to prostitute talents; to prostitute official powers.

adjective

Prostitute adj. Openly given up to lewdness; devoted to base or infamous purposes. "Made bold by want, and prostitute for bread."

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Etymology of 'Prostitute'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Prostitute" Quotes from Famous Books

... contempt, they become most wicked and incorrigible, according to the word of Jer. 2:20: "Thou hast broken My yoke, thou hast burst My bands, and thou hast said: 'I will not serve.' For on every high hill and under every green tree thou didst prostitute thyself." Hence Augustine says (Ep. lxxviii ad Pleb. Hippon.): "From the time I began to serve God, even as I scarcely found better men than those who made progress in monasteries, so have I not found worse than those who in ...

— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... A woman of the town, or prostitute; Drury-lane and its environs were formerly the residence of ...

— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.

... one finds a female delinquent who has not been in the beginning a working girl. For, sad and terrible though it be, the truth is that the majority of "unfortunates," whether of the specifically criminal or of the prostitute class, are what they are, not because they are inherently vicious, but because they were failures as workers and as wage-earners. They were failures as such, primarily, for no other reason than that they did ...

— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... are mostly the friends, and one of them is the gentleman who is bail for and sits near Mr. Hastings. They state to you this horrible and venal transaction, by which the government was set to sale, by which a bastard son was elevated to the wrong of the natural and legitimate heir, and in which a prostitute, his mother, was put in the place of the honorable and legitimate mother of ...

— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... as for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that attracted men to vice and only stopping those which discouraged them from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays appear (as Shaw pointed out) in which the prostitute and the procuress are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as revelling in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime of Shaw was not that he introduced the Gaiety Girl; that ...

— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

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