Mercenary

How to spell mercenary

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce mercenary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mercenary mean?

1. nounA soldier who fights for a foreign army purely for payment rather than loyalty or cause.
2. adjectiveMotivated chiefly by the desire for money or personal gain.

Mercenary in a sentence

• noun

  The warlord recruited a band of foreign mercenary fighters to hold the border.

• adjective

  Critics called his decision purely mercenary, driven by the size of the bonus.

• noun

  The documentary traced how a former mercenary ended up guarding oil installations abroad.

• adjective

  She resented the mercenary tone of the sales team, who cared only about commission.

Where does mercenary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin mercenarius, meaning 'a worker hired for wages', which was built on merces, the Latin noun for 'pay, wages, or reward'. The same merces root lies behind 'merchant', 'commerce', and 'mercer', all tied to the idea of trade and money changing hands. English took the word in during the late 1300s, by way of Old French and directly from Latin, first describing any labourer who worked simply for payment. Over time the soldier sense came to dominate, naming a fighter who serves a foreign army purely for money rather than loyalty or cause. The adjective sense, meaning 'driven only by financial gain', grew naturally from the same root, and the buried merc- (think of money) is a useful anchor for the unstressed middle of the spelling.

How the word is built

• merc- (from Latin merces: wages, pay)
• -en-
• -ary (suffix forming noun/adjective)