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Prostitute   Listen
noun
Prostitute  n.  
1.
A woman giver to indiscriminate lewdness; a strumpet; a harlot.
2.
A base hireling; a mercenary; one who offers himself to infamous employments for hire. "No hireling she, no prostitute to praise."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Prostitute" Quotes from Famous Books



... women full human beings, trained and useful in some form of work; the class of busy idlers, who run about forever "entertaining" and being "entertained" will disappear as utterly as will the prostitute. No woman with real work to do could have the time for such petty amusements; or enjoy them if she did have time. No woman with real work to do, work she loved and was well fitted for, work honored and well-paid, would take up the Unnatural ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... astonished to see me look so solemn, preaching to her, like a missionary glorifying chastity with a prostitute on his knees; her gaze wandered continually from my austere countenance to the bed close by. Her common sense was baffled before the incongruity between such virtue and the ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... found to impute to his selection of a residence, any base and grovelling passion for gourmandaise, that day's experience should be an eternal vindication of him. The soup—alas! that I should so far prostitute the word; for the black broth of Sparta was mock turtle in comparison—retired to make way for a mass of beef, whose tenderness I did not question; for it sank beneath the knife of the carver like a feather bed—the skill of Saladin himself ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... he snarled. "Did the world ever give anything to me? And what would they do with this? They would prostitute it to their own selfish ends; it would be just one more means to conquer and kill; and the capitalists would have it in their own dirty hands so that new lines of transportation beyond anything they dared dream would ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... dressing sot, To boast of favours that he never got; Of which, whoe'er lacks confidence to prate, Brings his good parts and breeding in debate; And not the meanest coxcomb you can find, But thanks his stars, that Phillis has been kind; Thus prostitute my Congreve's name is grown To every lewd pretender of the town. Troth, I could pity you; but this is it, You find, to be the fashionable wit; These are the slaves whom reputation chains, Whose maintenance requires no help from brains. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... this, Mr. Gilmore,—that you should take steps to prevent that young man's return among our people. You should explain to the father that it cannot be allowed. From what I hear, it would be no loss if the whole family left the parish. I am told that one of the daughters is a—prostitute." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... down the gloomy, stone-flagged hall of the great barracks until sheer weariness drove them out into the turbid current of the "Highway," there to seek speedily some of the dirty haunts where the "runner" and the prostitute: awaited them. ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... Russian Pacific Islands. Success of Sir Robert Morier; how gained. Worldly wisdom of Great Britain. Difficulties regarding Israelites; my long despatch on the subject to Secretary Gresham. Adventurous Americans. Efforts to prostitute American citizenship. Difficulties arising from the complicated law of the Empire. Violations of the Buchanan Treaty. Cholera at St. Petersburg; thorough measures taken by the Government; death of Tschaikovsky; difficulty ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... of consequence in every department of life. But you don't look for character in the proprietors, servants, customers and hangers-on of dives. No more ought you to look for honor among any of the people that have to do with the big gilded dive of the dollarocracy. They are there to gamble, and to prostitute themselves. The fact that they look like gentlemen and have the manners and the language of gentlemen ought to deceive nobody but the callow chaps of the sort that believes the swell gambler is "an honest fellow" and a "perfect gentleman otherwise," because he wears a dress suit in the evening ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips

... so when we call an earth road a dirt road we commit a vulgar error by employing a wrong epithet. All this I know, and yet, conforming to a custom, because it is a custom followed by all except a smattering of purists, I humiliate my sense of integrity, and I prostitute the virtue of my ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... distinguished by all the tumult and storm of pleasures, in which he most licentiously triumphed, disdaining all decorum. His fine imagination has often been heated and exhausted, with his body, in celebrating and deifying the prostitute of the night; and his convivial joys were pushed to all the extravagance of frantic Bacchanals. Those passions were interrupted but by a stronger ambition. The former impaired both his constitution and his ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... sufficient to furnish him with a due Experience in his Trade; and that if he would not set out to undertake some Buildings, he would step into the World for better Information. Mr. Wood a mild, sober, honest Man, indulg'd him; and Mrs. Wood with Tears, exhorted him against the Company of this lewd Prostitute: But her Man prompted and harden'd by his HARLOT, D—- n'd her Blood, and threw a Stick at his Mistress, and beat her to the Ground. And being with his Master at Work at Mr. Britt's the Sun Ale-house near Islington, upon a very trivial ...
— The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard • Daniel Defoe

... on or oppress, ruin, damage, upon, persecute, slander, defame, injure, pervert, victimize, defile, malign, prostitute, vilify, disparage, maltreat, rail at, violate, harm, misemploy, ravish, vituperate, ill-treat, misuse, reproach, wrong. ill-use, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... which followed in 1876, two years later, Huysmans is almost as far from actual achievement as in Le Drageoir a Epices, but the book, in its crude attempt to deal realistically, and somewhat after the manner of Goncourt, with the life of a prostitute of the lowest depths, marks a considerable advance upon the somewhat casual experiments of his earlier manner. It is important to remember that Marthe preceded La Fille Elisa and Nana. 'I write what ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... and honest hands in order to earn a supper for the household, she sees passing along the street on the head or on the body of a public woman. Thirty times a day a hired carriage stops before the door and there steps out a prostitute, numbered as is the hack in which she rides, who stands before a glass and primps, taking off and putting on the results of many days' work on the part of the poor girl who watches her. She sees that woman draw from her pocket six pieces of gold, she who has but one a ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... wish there never may. But I should be very sorry that any of them should be so weak as to imitate a Court chaplain in England, who preached against 'The Beggar's Opera,' which will probably do more good than a thousand sermons of so stupid, so injudicious, and so prostitute a divine. ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville

... strong, but I trust the day will never come when I shall abstain from expressing my contempt for those who prostitute Science to the Service of Error. At any rate I am not old enough for that yet. Darwin came in just now. I get no scoldings for pitching ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... of Samaria, from whom all heresies derive their origin, has as the material for his sect the following: Having redeemed from slavery at Tyre, a city of Phoenicia, a certain woman named Helena,(38) a prostitute, he was in the habit of carrying her about with him, declaring that she was the first conception [Ennoea] of his mind, the mother of all, by whom he conceived in his mind to make the angels and archangels. For this Ennoea, leaping forth from ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... you have been honest enough; you have never even pretended to think of me as anything else but a prostitute,—a trumpery bit of second-hand finery that plenty of other men ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... be the worst use a man can put his wit to, of thousands, to prostitute it at every tavern and ordinary; yet, methinks, you should have turn'd your broadside at this, and have been ready with an apology, able to sink this hulk of ignorance into the bottom and depth ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

... in Zenith, a cocaine-runner and a prostitute were drinking cocktails in Healey Hanson's saloon on Front Street. Since national prohibition was now in force, and since Zenith was notoriously law-abiding, they were compelled to keep the cocktails innocent by drinking them out of tea-cups. The lady threw her cup at the cocaine-runner's head. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... one eyebrow. "It is not altogether a matter of politics. Rather, as I see it, it is a matter of common-sense. Under the Stuarts England was a prostitute among the nations, lackey in turn to Spain and France and Italy; under the Guelph the Three-per-cents. are to-day at par. The question as to which is preferable thus resolves itself into a choice between common-sense and bedlamite folly. But, unhappily, you ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... characteristic of Egypt is all this scene. Her reverence, it is true, sits behind a curtain; but her virtue uses language which would shame the lowest European prostitute; and which is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... said the earl, "who know men, and who have lived all our lives in the world, must laugh behind the scenes at the cant we wrap in tinsel, and send out to stalk across the stage. We know that our Coriolanus of Tory integrity is a corporal kept by a prostitute, and the Brutus of Whig liberty is a lacquey turned out of place for stealing the spoons; but we must not tell this to the world. So, Brandon, you must write me a speech for the next session, and be sure it has plenty of general maxims, and ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... in the sensualist the excitement precedes the vision. Another effect is noticed in the physiognomy which changes in accordance with the development of the nerve centres and presents all the appearances of the typical sensualist or prostitute. ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll

... avowed Concubine: All Bavaria was scandalized by her impudent and abandoned conduct. Her feasts vied in luxury with Cleopatra's, and Lindenberg became the Theatre of the most unbridled debauchery. Not satisfied with displaying the incontinence of a Prostitute, She professed herself an Atheist: She took every opportunity to scoff at her monastic vows, and loaded with ridicule the most sacred ceremonies ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... did not cry like any schoolgirl whose lover has forgotten her, at the shame of her life, and the bitterness and humiliation of her daily bread. She would rail at the old Duke, who had come to it so easily, and was willing to prostitute the honors of his race for gross creature comforts, his claret, his cigar; and every morning, when her old eyes opened, she hated the daylight that told her she was ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... patience as he could command to the principal crown witness, giving such evidence that the tenth part of what he heard should not only have ended the case, but secured condign punishment for perjury—evidence that a prostitute court found good enough to justify the infliction on Poerio, not long before a minister of the crown, of the dreadful penalty of four-and-twenty years in irons. Mr. Gladstone accurately informed himself of the condition of those who ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... deceit; instead of loading you with praise, he will point you to the better way. I scoff at Cleon's tricks and plotting; honesty and justice shall fight my cause; never will you find me a political poltroon, a prostitute to ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... written Qodshu, like that of the town: E. de Bouge argued from this that Qaddishat must have been the eponymous divinity of Qodshu, and that her real name was Kashit or Kesh; he recalls, however, the role played by the Qedeshoth, and admits that "the Holy here means the prostitute." ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... to give a loose to its own sallies; and to be curbed, restrained and directed by that sound judgment alone which necessarily attends it. It belongs to it to improve and correct the public taste; not to humour or meanly prostitute itself to the gross or low taste which it finds. And you may depend upon it, that whatever author labours to accommodate himself to the taste of his age—suppose it, if you please, this present age—the sickly wane, the impotent decline of the eighteenth ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen

... from the general biological fact that sexual promiscuity tends to pathological conditions unfavorable to fecundity, that is, fertility, or the birth of offspring. Physicians have long ago ascertained this fact, and the modern prostitute gives illustration of it by the fact that she has few or no children. Among the lower animal species, in which some degree of promiscuity obtains, moreover, powerful instincts keep the sexes apart except at the pairing season. Now, no such instincts exist in man. Promiscuity in man would, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... conquered thee, And changed the object of thy will, It had been lethargy in me, Not constancy, to love thee still. Yea, it had been a sin to go And prostitute affection so, Since we are taught no prayers to say To such as ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... them.' 'With all my heart,' replied the bishop, and sent for some. Afterwards, the Protector knit his brows and his lips, and rising up in great wrath, he exclaimed, 'My lords, I have to tell you, that that old sorceress, my brother Edward's widow, and her partner, that common prostitute, Jane Shore, have by witchcraft and enchantment been contriving to take away my life, and though by God's mercy they have not been able to finish this villany, yet see the mischief they have done me; (and then he showed his left arm,) how they have caused this dear limb of mine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various

... him. She was evidently in a prostitute's tantrum of malicious deviltry. Presently she would begin to lash ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers

... done in a private manner, and the men did not seem to interest themselves much in it. But now, I was told, they were the chief promoters of a shameful traffic, and that for a spike-nail, or any other thing they value, they would oblige the women to prostitute themselves, whether they would or no; and even without any regard to that privacy ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... is dead, who, then, in God's name is responsible for his death? I, I alone! Do you think that I am so heartless that I can look upon such things with no pang of self-reproach? I wish that I were old and ugly, fortuneless and an outcast—or dead. Then I would not be compelled to prostitute my beauty and my talents to conspire with a rabble of scoundrels and convicts who discuss murder and assassination as if ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... things so prostitute, And take the Alcaic lute; Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon's lyre; ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... singing heroine of the French opera, figured more than once as the goddess of reason, that divinity was generally personified by some shameless female, who, if not a notorious prostitute, was frequently little better. Her throne occupied the place of the altar; her supporters were chiefly drunken soldiers, smoking their pipe; and before her, were a set of half-naked vagabonds, singing and dancing ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... all give way, And conscience dies, the prostitute of play. Eternity ne'er steals one thought between, Till suicide completes the ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... poison, empoison[obs3], envenom, canker, corrupt, exulcerate|, pollute, vitiate, inquinate|; debase, embase|; denaturalize, denature, leaven; deflower, debauch, defile, deprave, degrade; ulcerate; stain &c. (dirt) 653; discolor; alloy, adulterate, sophisticate, tamper with, prejudice. pervert, prostitute, demoralize, brutalize; render vicious &c. 945. embitter, acerbate, exacerbate, aggravate. injure, impair, labefy[obs3], damage, harm, hurt, shend|, scath|, scathe, spoil, mar, despoil, dilapidate, waste; overrun; ravage; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... of men have such an ignoble way of thinking that if they debauch their hearts and prostitute their persons, following perhaps a gust of inebriation, the wife, slave rather, whom they maintain has no right to complain, and ought to receive the sultan whenever he deigns to return with open arms, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... a union man, sharing the Socialist distrust of capitalists and rulers. What this weather-bitten toiler of the sea told to Jimmie, Jimmie was prepared to understand and believe; so he learned, what he had refused to learn from prostitute newspapers, that there was a code of sea-manners and sea-morals, a law of marine decency, which for centuries had been unbroken save by pirates and savages. The men who went down to the sea in ships were a class of their own, with instincts born of the peculiar cruelties of the element they ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... hours on Saturday morning—the very Saturday when my poor little woman, after she had been turned away by those prating philanthropists, was being sheltered by the prostitute. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... manner as the spirit of gaming has seized upon these different institutions and amusements of antiquity, and turned them from their original to new and destructive uses, so there is no certainty, that it will not seize upon others, which may have been innocently resorted to, and prostitute them equally with the former. The mere prohibition of particular amusements, even if it could be enforced, would be no cure for the evil. The brain of man is fertile enough, as fast as one custom is prohibited, to fix upon another. And if ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... persuaded and entrapped by old women, whose main business it is to supply the market. We know of at least one village where beautiful children, who have been decoyed or purchased from their parents by these prostitute-hunters, are taken to be reared and trained for the profession. In Bombay there is actually a caste in which the girls are in early childhood "married to the dagger," or, in other words, dedicated to a life ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... was made severer. Tiberius decreed that no woman, whose grandfather, father or husband had been or still was a Roman Knight, could prostitute herself for money. Married women, who caused themselves to be entered in the registers of prostitutes, were condemned to banishment from Italy as adulteresses. Of course, there were no such punishments for the men. Moreover, as Juvenal reports, even the murder of husbands by poison was ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... can enjoy her while she 's kind; But when she dances in the wind, And shakes the wings and will not stay, I puff the prostitute away. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... possible for the girl would be that of a prostitute. She might be married by the temple priests to the god Khandoka, as thousands of widows had been, and thus become a nun of the temple, a prostitute to the celibate priests. Knowing all this, and that Bootea was what she was, her face and eyes holding ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... function for, or express the relations of, some higher aggregate. So Science functions for and serves society at large, and would, from society at large, receive no support, unless it did so divert itself or dissipate and prostitute itself. It seems that by ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... locusts, plagues of lice, Foul food, foul water, and foul gases, Rank exhalations from morasses. If you employ such low allies This business you will vulgarize. Renouncing then the field of fame To wallow in a waste of shame, I'll prostitute my strength and lurk About the country doing work— These hands to labor I'll devote, Nor cut, ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... highly necessary; for as we are never in a proper condition of doing justice to others, while we continue under the influence of some leading partiality, so neither are we capable of doing it to ourselves while we remain fettered by any obstinate prejudice. And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine

... Simon Magus! woe to you, His wretched followers! who the things of God, Which should be wedded unto goodness, them, Rapacious as ye are, do prostitute For gold and silver in adultery! Now must the trumpet sound for you, since yours Is the third chasm. Upon the following vault We now had mounted, where the rock impends Directly o'er the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... corrupt motives of Mr. Hastings's proceedings. The Nabob Jaffier Ali Khan had among the women of his seraglio a person called Munny Begum. She was a dancing-girl, whom he had seen at some entertainment; and as he was of a licentious turn, this dancing-girl, in the course of her profession as a prostitute, so far inveigled the Nabob, that, having a child or pretending to have had a child by him, he brought her into the seraglio; and the Company's servants sold to that son the succession of that father. This woman had been sold as a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... not the worst; my father deceives himself in the hopes of the very child he has brought into the world; he suffers his house to be the seat of drunkenness, riot, and irreligion, who seduces, almost in my sight, the menial servant, converses with the prostitute, and corrupts the wife! Thus I, who from my earliest dawn of reason was taught to think that at my approach every eye sparkled with pleasure, or was dejected as conscious of superior charms, am excluded from society, through fear lest I should partake, if not of my father's crimes, at least ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... of brain and body as may lure King Richard to be swayed by you, until against his will you daily guide this shallow-hearted fool to some commendable action. I bid you live as other folk do hereabouts. Coax! beg! cheat! wheedle! lie!" he barked like a teased dog, "and play the prostitute for him that wears my crown, till you achieve in part the task which is denied me. This doom I dare adjudge and to pronounce, because we are royal and God's ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... of these diabolical things, and their economic faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents they were forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only effective, but even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for it, like ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... while they permit their souls to famish, and do nothing for their redemption! Will not such parents be denounced in the day of judgment as unjust and unfaithful stewards? And yet alas! how many such Christian parents there are who prostitute this highest interest of home either at the altar of mammon or of fashion! The precious time and talents with which God has entrusted them, they squander away in things of folly and of sin, leaving their children to grow up in spiritual ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... Constantine the Great, after he had given his name to Christ, by an edict provided and took order that the temples of the idols might be closed and shut up; but, because they did still remain, Julian the Apostate did easily open and unlock them, and thereafter did prostitute the idols of old superstition to be worshipped in them,—which Theodosius, the best and commended prince, animadverting, commanded to pull them down, lest they should again any more be restored." But because I suppose no sober spirit will ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie

... their conversion from time to time, now on the sudden gave themselves up to God, and even renounced the world. The most inveterate enemies were sincerely reconciled, and the most impudent harlots abandoned their prostitute way ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden

... "association". They restated the Stamp Act Resolves and asserted that should anyone comply with the Stamp Act the "associators—will with the utmost Expedition convince all such Profligates, that immediate danger and disgrace shall attend their prostitute Purpose." Should any associator suffer as a result of his action, the others pledged "at the utmost risk of our Lives and Fortunes to restore such Associate to his Liberty." The next day the associators crossed over the Rappahannock to Hobb's Hole and "convinced" Tory merchant ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... pay too much respect to the wisdom of the French Cabinet, to suppose that they can be influenced by such efforts of visible despair, and that we have too much reverence for the honor of the American Congress to prostitute its authority, by filling our own newspapers with the same kind of invented tales, which characterise ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various

... a breach of faith. This brought Douglas to his feet. With fierce invective he declared this whole movement was instigated by the circulars sent out by the Abolition confederates in the Senate. These preachers had been led by an atrocious falsehood "to desecrate the pulpit, and prostitute the sacred desk to the miserable and corrupting influence of party politics." What right had these misguided men to speak in the name of Almighty God upon a political question? It was an attempt to establish in this country the doctrine ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... he adds, in a postscript, "that not even parental authority or influence could ever have brought the beautiful and accomplished Miss Theodosia Burr thus to prostitute herself to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... Favourite, in order to obtain, by Means of her Interests, the just Reward of your Services. She took a Pleasure in countenancing Merit, and certainly such as yours would have engag'd her Favour." "I, Madam," replied the Officer, with Indignation, "should I make a Prostitute my Refuge? I am her Relation, and it is the only Blot that I know of in our Family. I am too tender in Point of Honour, to hold any Thing from the Hands of a Woman, who has so notoriously trampled it under her Feet." At ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon

... of stairs, with a sixpenny dinner from the cook's shop. Well, I suppose this promise will go after the others, and fortune will jilt me, as the jade has been doing any time these seven years. 'I puff the prostitute away,' " says he, smiling, and blowing a cloud out of his pipe. "There is no hardship in poverty, Esmond, that is not bearable; no hardship even in honest dependence that an honest man may not put up ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... solely from curiosity, monsieur," he said at last. "It is not my habit to prostitute a power which, according to my conviction, emanates from God; if I made a frivolous or unworthy use of it, it would be taken from me. Nevertheless, there is some hope, Monsieur Bouvard tells me, of changing the opinions of one who has opposed us, of enlightening a scientific man whose mind is ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac

... of God has been laid heavily upon you. You refused to give your son to him, and he has delivered him over to a prostitute; will you not profit by this lesson from heaven? God's mercy is infinite, and perhaps he will pardon you if you throw yourself at his feet. I am his humble servant, and I will open his door to you when you come ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... often as not the flower of her kind.—Or becomes it.—For see all she gains on her way: the mere passing from hand to hand; the intense impressionable nature; the process of being moulded—why, even the common prostitute gets a certain manly breadth of mind, such as you other women never arrive at. Each one who comes and goes leaves her something: an experience—a turn of thought—it may be only an intuition—which ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... it is the Martian's turn to inquire of the Hebrew whether the latter had ever read this story to his own daughter? Or, the story of Abraham's affair with Hagar, his handmaiden? Was the Hebrew's young daughter aware that Isaac, son of Abraham, was as ready and willing to prostitute his wife for protection for himself as ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... saddest symptoms of degeneracy in a people is evinced by a desperate levity—a scoffing spirit such as that which inspired the French people when they denied even God, and substituted a prostitute to be their "Goddess of Reason." Much of that spirit is unhappily manifesting itself in ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... the outward evidences of belonging to the world's oldest profession. Her youthful face is already hard and cynical beneath its layer of make-up. Her clothes are the tawdry finery of peasant stock turned prostitute. She comes and sinks wearily in a chair by the ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill

... virtuous as she was beautiful, consents to sin for the first time, they do it in the plainest fashion. A "galaunt" meets her and tells her that he finds her very pretty, and loves her. "Why, sir," the young lady replies, "wene you that I were a kelle (prostitute)?" Not at all, says the other, but you are so pretty! Shall we not dance together? Shall ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... contumely, but fifty years earlier he might have been visited by a "lettre de cachet," instead of a knighthood; for we can not forget how, in Eighteen Hundred Fifteen, Parliament refused to pay for the Elgin Marbles because, as Lord Falmouth put it, "These relics will tend to prostitute England to the depth of unbelief that engulfed Pagan Greece." The attitude of Parliament on the question of Paganism finds voice occasionally even yet by Protestant England making darkness dense with the asseveration that Catholics idolatrously worship the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... previous mendacity, four had been liars from childhood. She found in them the combination of the general habit of lying underneath the more accentuated form of pseudologia phantastica. One case had perverted sex feeling, one was a prostitute at ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy

... Puritans, that a woman could appear on the English stage without being pelted off as the Italian actresses were. The theatrical profession was regarded as a shameless one; and it is only of late years that actresses have at last succeeded in living down the assumption that actress and prostitute are synonymous terms, and made good their position in respectable society. This makes the survival of the old ostracism in the Act of 1843 intolerably galling; and though it explains the apparently unaccountable absurdity of choosing as Censor of dramatic literature an official whose ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw

... originally a fine, swaggering fellow, as in "Bully Bottom" in A Midsummer Night's Dream, later an overbearing ruffian, especially a coward who abuses his strength by ill-treating the weak; more technically a souteneur, a man who lives on the earnings of a prostitute. The term in its early use of "fine" or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... labor, or war. Yet the poverty and neglect which drives a girl into prostitution usually has its source in a family too large to be properly cared for by the mother, if the girl is not actually subnormal because her mother bore too many children, and, therefore, the more likely to become a prostitute. Labor is oppressed because it is too plentiful; wages go up and conditions improve when labor is scarce. Large families make plentiful labor and they also provide the workers for the child-labor factories as well as the armies of unemployed. That population, swelled by overbreeding, is a basic ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... such women stand out for a maintenance, while the prostitute takes cash?" I saw that I had shocked her, and I said: "You must be humble about these things, because you have never been poor, and you cannot judge those who have been. But surely you must have known worldly women who married rich men for their money. And surely you admit ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair

... this period of his despicable life, was living in concubinage with a prostitute he had picked up in the mud of the Rue Fromenteau, the girl Athenais, easily suborned her to his purposes and made use of her to foment the counterrevolution by impudent and unpatriotic cries and ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... refused to carry out their Government's orders? When they deny justice to a long suffering people? Loyal! Don't prostitute the word. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... forever!' Under the orders of her father, the daughter of Cheops made herself a harlot that she might contribute by her body to the building of the pyramid. And now to raise the pyramids of our massive republics, millions of citizens prostitute their consciences and themselves, body and soul, to falsehood and hate. We have become past masters in the great art of lying. True, it was always known, but the difference between us and our forefathers ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... pleasantry of their conceits. His wit is so predominant, that, if we may be allowed the expression, it is discovered in his silence. A most striking example of this is where he uses the rhetorical figure called the Aposiopesis, or suppression, in displaying the head of a prostitute: he introduces it with saying, "This is the head of a woman of the town, or a ———; but, whatever other title the lady may have, we are not entitled here to take notice of it." Nothing can be more delicate than this suppression: ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens

... Viola was not even his step-sister. He experienced a thrill of joy over that,—notwithstanding the ugly truth that gave her the new standing; to his simple, straightforward mind, Viola's mother was nothing more than a prostitute. (In his thoughts he employed another word, for he lived in a day when prostitutes were called by another name.) Still, Viola was not to blame for that. That could ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon

... a female: as long as she is private property, she is excellent; but public virtue, like any other public lady, is a common prostitute." ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... lives by begging—a dirty, useless, stupid beggar. Oh, no, no! You wouldn't do that—you couldn't marry a man like that simply because the job had exhausted you. Why, you'd die at work first. Why, if you married him for board and keep, you'd be a prostitute—you'd be marrying him just because he was a 'good provider.' And probably, when he didn't provide any more, you'd be quitter enough to leave him—maybe for another man. You couldn't do that. I don't believe life could bully you into doing that.... Oh, I'm hysterical; ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... a kind of ecclesiastical Falstaff. A most immoral, licentious Dominican, who for money would prostitute even the Church and Holy Scriptures. Dominick helped Lorenzo in his amour with Elvi'ra ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... thou make me the tenant of thy lust, To toil, and for my labour take the dregs, The juicy vintage being left for thee? No: she's an infamous, lewd prostitute: I loath her ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott

... aids to prostitution as a business are the high immediate wages of vice in contrast with the low wages of virtue. A girl in the shop, or factory, or office may be capitalized at six thousand dollars; in the clutches of a procurer, she may become worth twenty-six thousand dollars. As a prostitute, she "earns more than four times as much as she is worth as a factor in the social and industrial economy, where brains, intelligence, virtue and womanly charm should bring a premium." In an average lifetime, to be sure, the wages of one woman in industry are greater than the earnings ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various

... children to their gods. Europeans approve duels; he who refuses to cut the throat of another, or to blow out the brains of his neighbour, is contemplated by them as dishonoured. The Spaniards and Portuguese think it meritorious to burn an heretic. In some countries women prostitute themselves without dishonour; in others it is the height of hospitality for a man to present his wife to the embraces of the stranger: the refusal to accept this, excites his scorn and calls forth ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... a child is begotten in lust, its lower passions will as certainly be abnormally developed as peas will produce peas, or potatoes produce potatoes. If the child does not become a rake or a prostitute, it will be because of uncommonly fortunate surroundings, or a miracle of divine grace. But even then, what terrible struggles with sin and vice, with foul thoughts and lewd imaginations—the product of a naturally abnormal mind—must such an individual suffer! ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... travelled over northern India continually preaching and disputing with the advocates of other religions, and founding branches of his sect. In 1883 he died at Ajmer, according to the story of his followers, from the effects of poison administered to him at the instigation of a prostitute against whose profession he had been ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... a deer-rifle for Dot, a couple of years ago—Mexican-Mauser action, Johnson barrel, chambered for .300 Savage; Umholtz made the stock and fitted a scope-sight—it's a beautiful little rifle. I hate to see him prostitute his talents the way he does by making these fake antiques for Rivers. You know, he made one of these mythical heavy .44 six-shooters of the sort Colt was supposed to have turned out at Paterson in 1839 for Colonel Walker's Texas Rangers—you know, the model he couldn't find any of in 1847, ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper

... with a degree of indecency scarcely to be credited, especially under an ecclesiastical government, did not scruple to convert the wages of sin into a source of revenue, as scandalous in its nature as it must have been contemptible in its amount, by exacting from every prostitute a weekly tax of a farthing, for liberty to exercise ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... pleased with the Turkish manners; a people, though ignorant, yet, in my judgment, extremely polite. A gallant, convicted of having debauched a married Woman, is regarded as a pernicious being, and held in the same abhorrence as a prostitute with us. He is certain of never making his fortune; and they would deem it scandalous to confer any considerable employment on a man suspected of having ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... WOMEN.—Gonorrhea in women is a much more frequent and serious disease than was formerly supposed. The general impression among the laity is that gonorrhea in women is limited to the prostitute and vicious classes who indulge in licentious relations. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is perhaps more gonorrhea, in the aggregate, among virtuous and respectable wives than among professional prostitutes, ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various

... house, where the proprietress is more cruel and exacting, and where the visitors are rougher and ruder than those who frequented the place in which the lost one began her career. Two or three years in these houses is the average, and by this time the woman has become a thorough prostitute. She has lost her refinement, and, it may be, has added drunkenness to her other sin, and has become full-mouthed and reckless. She has sunk too low to be fit for even such a place as this, and she is turned out without pity to take the next step in her ruin. Greene ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... deputation, offered Bonaparte their homage at Milan, and exchanged liberty for bondage, assured me that this ci-devant chief magistrate spoke with a faltering voice and with tears in his eyes, and that indignation was read on the countenance of every member of the deputation thus forced to prostitute their rights as citizens, and to vilify their sentiments ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... They provide notoriety for the fellows who can't distinguish themselves at running a business or practicing law or developing an industry. Here you have a mediocre lawyer with no brains and no practice, trying to get a look-in on something. He comes up with the novel proposition that the prostitute has a hard time of it, puts his picture in the paper, and the first thing you know, he's a celebrity. He gets the rake-off and she's just where she was before. How could you fall for a ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... among these primitive beings a most curious and most disgusting custom. The young marriageable females were permitted to prostitute themselves for gain, in order to provide a marriage portion; and she who could thus enrich herself was the most distinguished and the most sought. But after marriage, she was compelled to purity, both ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... their paltry earnings and left them to perish? Louis XV., who permitted his country to be wined, its revenues squandered, its provinces lost, and half-a-million men sent to an untimely death that a prostitute might be revenged for an epigram! Is that the kind of man our money lords admire? Louis lived until the fleur-de-lis of France was struck down in every land and dishonored on every sea, then died, deserted ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... ought, indeed, to have a good tongue, but he should not make a common prostitute of his tongue, and employ it to the wicked purpose of abusing and imposing upon all that come to deal with him. There is a modest liberty, which trading licence, like the poetic licence, allows to all the tradesmen ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... wont sometimes to bring thither a woman for his pleasure, and after keeping her there for a few days to escort her thence again. Now on one of these occasions it befell that he brought thither one Niccolosa, whom a vile fellow, named Mangione, kept in a house at Camaldoli as a common prostitute. And a fine piece of flesh she was, and wore fine clothes, and for one of her sort, knew how to comport herself becomingly and ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio

... ye hendecasyllables, as many as may be, from every part, all of ye, as many soever as there be! A shameless prostitute deems me fair sport, and denies return to me of our writing tablets, if ye are able to endure this. Let's after her, and claim them back. "Who may she be," ye ask? That one, whom ye see strutting awkwardly, stagily, and stiffly, and with a laugh on her mouth ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... young men! we have of our own at home, and great plenty of good things there, together with the natural, affectionate parents and friends; nor is it out of our want of any such things that we came to discourse with you; nor did we admit of your invitation with design to prostitute the beauty of our bodies for gain; but taking you for brave and worthy men, we agreed to your request, that we might treat you with such honors as hospitality required: and now seeing you say that you have a great affection for us, and are troubled when you think we ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... character and costume, could be found in that wild and monstrous harlequinade. The whole was made up of extravagant transformations and burlesque contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans; Puritans turned Atheists; republicans defending the divine right of kings; prostitute courtiers clamouring for the liberties of the people; judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing bribes from foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into Episcopacy in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... reconciliation, he takes fresh umbrage, and sends money to her for her complaisance with another letter of more abominable insult than ever. Now it is bad to insult any one of whom you have been fond; worse to insult any woman; but to insult a prostitute, faugh![359] ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury



Words linked to "Prostitute" :   woman, harlot, working girl, street girl, fancy woman, slattern, floozie, ianfu, comfort woman, hustler, prostitution, demimondaine, streetwalker, sell, hooker, tart, call girl, street-walk



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