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lucrative

adjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈluː.kɹə.tɪv//
  • Canada//ˈlu.kɹə.tɪv//
  • Canada/[ˈlu.kɹə.ɾɪv]/
  • Australia//ˈlʉː.kɹə.tɪv//

Producing a surplus; profitable.

adjective

  1. 1

    Producing a surplus; profitable.

    Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.

    In a given recent year, Celine has earned $40-$50 million from her various endeavors, though the majority of that income was thanks to a lucrative Las Vegas residency deal.

  2. 2

    Of a target: worth attacking; whose destruction is militarily useful.

    Command and Control centers and headquarters are strategically important and lucrative targets.

    Its troops can be widely dispersed as light infantry, using light anti-ship, anti-air and anti-land missiles and weapons to defenda given area or facility without presenting lucrative targets for air, missile, and artillery fire.

Etymology

Borrowed from French lucratif, from Latin lucrativus (“profitable”), from lucratus, past participle of lucror (“to gain”), from lucrum (“gain”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *leh₂w- (“profit, gain”). Compare Spanish lucrar. By surface analysis, lucre + -ative.

Forms

comparative
more lucrative
superlative
most lucrative
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).