lucrative
adjective
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Paying, gainful, remunerative, and lucrative are all used to describe ways to bring home the bacon, but each term suggests a different amount of bacon being brought in. Paying is the word for jobs that yield the smallest potatoes—a paying job should provide satisfactory compensation, but you're not going to get rich by it. Gainful employment might offer a bit more cash, and gainful certainly suggests that an individual is motivated by a desire for gain. Remunerative implies that a job provides more than the usual rewards, but a lucrative position is really the one you want—that's the kind that goes beyond your initial hopes or expectations to really bring in the lucre (both lucrative and lucre come from the Latin noun lucrum, meaning "gain" or "profit").
Synonyms
Examples of lucrative in a Sentence
Rachel Donadio, New York Times Book Review, 5 Feb. 2006
Clubs take care of their star and other best players first, paying them lucrative salaries. By the time they get to the bottom half of the roster, they would not have enough money left to pay veterans worthwhile salaries …
—Murray Chass, New York Times, 16 Aug. 1994
Since the health care industry is lucrative and largely insulated from the usual disciplines of the marketplace, it has been able to absorb an ever-growing fraction of the gross domestic product.
—Marcia Angell, New England Journal of Medicine, 17 June 1993
The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was Mr. Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the drier parts of the legal race.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
The business has proved to be highly lucrative.
the new manager's mission was to turn the failing store into a lucrative operation
Sofia Celeste, WWD, 30 Jan. 2025
First, Boston watched Tanner Scott sign a lucrative deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
—Thomas G. Moukawsher, Newsweek, 30 Jan. 2025
Porsha Williams makes a grand return after inking a lucrative new deal with Bravo, reclaiming her spot in the franchise.
—Shelby Stewart, Essence, 30 Jan. 2025
The hostilities are rooted in the spillover of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide into Congo and struggle for control of Congo’s lucrative minerals.
—Reuters, NBC News, 30 Jan. 2025
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Dictionary Entries Near lucrative
Cite this Entry
“Lucrative.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lucrative. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025.
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lucrative
adjective
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lucrative
adjective
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