men·di·cant

(mĕn′dĭ-kənt)

adj.

1. Depending on alms for a living; practicing begging.

2. Of or relating to religious orders whose members are forbidden to own property individually or in common and must work or beg for their livings.

1. A beggar.

2. A member of a mendicant order.

[Middle English mendicaunt, from Latin mendīcāns, mendīcant-, present participle of mendīcāre, to beg, from mendīcus, needy, beggar, from mendum, physical defect.]

men′di·can·cy, men·dic′i·ty (-dĭs′ĭ-tē) n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

mendicity - the state of being a beggar or mendicant; "they were reduced to mendicancy"

mendicancy, beggary

indigence, pauperism, pauperization, penury, need - a state of extreme poverty or destitution; "their indigence appalled him"; "a general state of need exists among the homeless"

mendicity

noun

The condition of being a beggar:

beggary, mendicancy.

Translations

mendicidad

mendicity

[menˈdɪsɪtɪ] N (frm) → mendicidad f

Collins Spanish Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged 8th Edition 2005 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1971, 1988 © HarperCollins Publishers 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

Mendicity on commission stooped in their high shoulders, shambled in their unsteady legs, buttoned and pinned and darned and dragged their clothes, frayed their button-holes, leaked out of their figures in dirty little ends of tape, and issued from their mouths in alcoholic breathings.

View in context

My lord, with forty thousand a year; Sir John, with property in half a dozen counties -- those are the men who never forgive the genteel beggar for swindling them out of a sovereign; those are the men who send for the mendicity officers; those are the men who take care of their money.

View in context

Inmates included destitute people accused of "mendicity" (being needy or beggarly), wives and children deserted by husbands or fathers, orphans and foundlings (abandoned children), "lunatics, insane persons and idiots," and tenant farmers evicted from their rented land.

Spinning Thistledown at Midnight

On Easter Sunday that year, he became one of the first people to die in the Rising when he was killed by a sniper's bullet fired from the Mendicity Institute.

The family wouldn't speak to Arthur because he fought for the other side, the same day his soldier brother was killed; 1916-2016: LIFELONG RIFT IN AFTERMATH OF THE RISING; Niece reveals how conflict divided a generation; EXCLUSIVE

Other strongholds are taken at the Mendicity Institute, and Boland's Mills and Bakery, plus 25 Northumberland Road and Clanwilliam House.

The Rising will go ahead, despite the setbacks

The "latent" and "stagnant" reserves of proletarians were regulated, in part, by the institutions designed to control mendicity and emigration.

Karl Marx, the theft of wood, and working-class composition: a contribution to the current debate

(37) Committee on the State of Mendicity in the Metropolis, Report, House of Commons Paper No 473, Session 1814-15 (1815); Select Committee on the State of Mendicity in the Metropolis, Report, House of Commons Paper No 396, Session 1816 (1816); Select Committee on the Existing Laws Relating to Vagrants, Report, House of Commons Paper No 543, Session 1821 (1821).

On the origins of consorting laws

Chapter 4 examines the description of the urban poor and especially the beggars in the context of the debates surrounding the Poor Law, and the activity of the London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity. Here, for once, Lamb appears to occupy a similar position to those of his poetic contemporaries, Blake and Wordsworth.

Marginalia and Marginal Figures in the Romantic Age

(15) Even though the figure of mendicity is immediately forced to reenter the circuit of exchange and possessive individualism, we see how the well-nigh divine presence of the invisible hand threatens to be upset by the beggar's all too visible, stretched-out hand.

Beggars banquet: for a critique of the political economy of the sign in Borges

(7) Spain's exhaustion by her colonial enterprises was after all a major contributory factor in the rising landscape of vagabondage and mendicity that defined the fictional world of the picaro.

Picaros, pirates, and colonial history

Waterford city was noticeable for the number of societies aimed at helping the poor of the city, and liberal Protestants were among the leading members of the Mendicity Society.

The nature and development of liberal protestantism in Waterford, 1800-1842