Mercenaries

How to spell mercenaries

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce mercenaries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mercenaries mean?

1. nounSoldiers who fight for any country or group purely for payment rather than loyalty or principle.
2. nounPeople regarded as acting solely for financial gain, used figuratively of those whose loyalty is for sale.

Mercenaries in a sentence

• The report claimed that foreign mercenaries had been paid to guard the oil fields.

• Critics dismissed the consultants as corporate mercenaries who would advise whoever paid the most.

• The company hired armed mercenaries to protect its convoys through the conflict zone.

• The columnist called the lobbyists political mercenaries with no real principles.

Where does mercenaries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin mercenarius, meaning 'hired for wages' or 'working only for pay', which was built on merces, the Latin noun for 'wages, pay, or reward'. That same merces root also gave English 'merchant' and 'mercy', the latter originally carrying a sense of a reward or favour granted. Latin mercenarius passed through Old French as mercenaire before settling into English in the late 1300s, first describing any hired worker and later narrowing to the familiar modern sense of a soldier who fights for money rather than loyalty or cause. The spelling preserves the Latin 'merc-' stem and the -ary ending, and the plural simply changes -y to -ies. The classic trap is the unstressed middle, since the 'e' in '-cen-' and the 'a' in '-ary' are both swallowed schwa sounds that tempt writers toward 'mercinaries' or 'mercenarys'.

How the word is built

• merc- (from Latin merces: wages, pay)
• -en-
• -ary (one connected with)
• -ies (plural)