lucrative
adjective
Did you know?
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
Chris Westfall, Forbes, 7 Dec. 2024
The investment could prove to be lucrative for Sun, given Trump's association with the project and the number of cryptocurrencies that have rallied following the election.
—Peter Charalambous, ABC News, 6 Dec. 2024
Films like The Equalizer franchise have proven not only commercially successful but also strategically lucrative, securing Denzel as a bankable star even in his later career.
—Kimberly Wilson, Essence, 5 Dec. 2024
After helping the New York Mets reach the National League Championship Series in 2024, Severino has qualified for the most lucrative payday of his career.
—Daniel R. Depetris, Newsweek, 5 Dec. 2024
See all Example Sentences for lucrative 
Dictionary Entries Near lucrative
Cite this Entry
“Lucrative.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lucrative. Accessed 21 Dec. 2024.
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lucrative
adjective
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lucrative
adjective
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