Lucrative

How to spell lucrative

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce lucrative

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lucrative mean?

1. adjectiveProducing a great deal of profit or financial gain.

Lucrative in a sentence

• The consultancy turned out to be far more lucrative than her old salaried job.

• Weekend tutoring became a surprisingly lucrative side business for him.

Where does lucrative come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Lucrative comes from the Latin lucrativus, meaning 'attended with gain' or 'profitable', which was built on the verb lucrari, 'to gain or to profit', and ultimately on the noun lucrum, meaning simply 'gain, profit, or wealth'. English took the word in during the 1400s, partly through Old French lucratif, where it carried the same sense of money-making activity. The very same lucrum root survives in the rather disapproving phrase 'filthy lucre', a term for money regarded as morally tainted, which shows how the idea of profit could carry a whiff of greed. The spelling trap sits in the middle and the end: the soft 'c' sounds like an 's' but is written with a single c, and the unstressed 'a' in '-ative' is easy to swallow or misspell as '-itive'. Keeping the Latin lucrum in mind anchors both the single c and the profit-related meaning.

How the word is built

• lucr- (from Latin lucrum: gain, profit)
• -ative (adjective suffix: tending to)