merchant
part of speech
noun (merchant, merchants); adjective (merchant ship, merchant navy)
meaning for a pupil
1) A merchant is a person who buys and sells goods to make money, a trader. tree →
2) In old times merchants sailed or travelled far to trade cloth, spices and gold. tree →
3) A merchant ship carries goods for trade, not soldiers. tree →
sense in the lessons
a person who buys, sells, makes profit or loss; prices and amounts of goods; in history and stories merchants travel, trade and get rich or lose everything; in everyday life we say shopkeeper or seller more often
examples
- A merchant buys 20 bags of rice for 5 dollars each. tree →
- He sells them for 7 dollars each. tree →
- What is his profit? tree →
- The merchant has 300 metres of cloth. tree →
- Merchants carried silk and spices along long roads. tree →
- The merchant ship sailed into the harbour. tree →
- In the story, a poor boy became a rich merchant. tree →
- The merchant weighed the tea on his scales. tree →
- The merchants considered for some time. tree →
note
A seller: profit = selling price minus cost price, × number of items. Trap: the profit on each bag is the difference, not the selling price. If he sells for less than he paid, it is a loss.
In the corpora
- Few traders travelled the whole Silk Road; goods usually passed from merchant to merchant and market to market.
- Venice was a merchant republic ruled by an elected Doge (a duke chosen for life) and councils of noble families.
- In the pearl of great price a merchant sold everything he had to buy one precious pearl.
- Who hath devised this against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth?
- The merchants among the peoples hiss at thee; thou art become a terror, and never shalt be any more.'
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «merchant» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.