lucrative
adjective
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Paying, gainful, remunerative, and lucrative share the meaning of bringing in a return of money, but each term casts a different light on how much green you take in. Paying is the word for jobs that yield the smallest potatoes—your first paying job probably provided satisfactory compensation, but you weren't 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 the one you want—those are the kind that go beyond your initial hopes or expectations.
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
Luke Mogelson, The New Yorker, 8 Apr. 2024
Those principles haven’t prevented Google signing lucrative military contracts with the Pentagon and Israel.
—Billy Perrigo, TIME, 8 Apr. 2024
The tool, Data iSight, is the premier offering of a cost-containment firm called MultiPlan that has attracted round after round of private equity investment since positioning itself as a central player in the lucrative medical payments field.
—Chris Hamby, New York Times, 7 Apr. 2024
The group’s leisure beach, listed among Nigeria’s best seven beaches in 2023 by the Lonely Planet travel guide, is a lucrative part of the 13-hectare mixed-use Landmark site along the Atlantic Ocean beachfront in Lagos’s affluent Victoria Island area.
—Nimi Princewill, CNN, 5 Apr. 2024
Horace’s lucrative silver mine in Leadville — called the Matchless Mine — was the blueprint for each Baby Doe’s restaurant.
—Jenna Thompson, Kansas City Star, 5 Apr. 2024
The countries and firms that develop quantum computing stand to gain a significant advantage in an array of lucrative industries, some experts told ABC News.
—Max Zahn, ABC News, 5 Apr. 2024
In ancient Egypt, temples dedicated to specific religious cults or gods functioned as lucrative businesses.
—Kate McMahon, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 Apr. 2024
In January, bids by local and international consortiums were submitted for the lucrative project.
—Heather Chen, CNN, 26 Mar. 2024
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'lucrative.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near lucrative
Cite this Entry
“Lucrative.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lucrative. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
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lucrative
adjective
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lucrative
adjective
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