Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The condition of being a mendicant; the state of beggary, or the act of begging.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The condition of being mendicant; beggary; begging.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The act or state of being a mendicant

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a solicitation for money or food (especially in the street by an apparently penniless person)
  • noun the state of being a beggar or mendicant

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

mendicant +‎ -cy

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Examples

  • To beg for votes, as if they were alms or broken victuals, is a form of mendicancy which is incompatible with common self-respect, and yet it is a self-abasement which thirty years ago custom imperatively demanded.

    Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography George William Erskine Russell 1886

  • And into my face I strove to throw all the wan wistfulness of famished and ingenuous youth of mendicancy.

    Confession 2010

  • Additionally, in medieval society unaccompanied and unsupervised women were seen as dangerous, to both themselves and others; so Dominican women were also denied the mendicancy that the men of the Order practiced. 12 To have espoused any other attitude would have been viewed as unnatural.

    Sensual Encounters: Monastic Women and Spirituality in Medieval Germany 2008

  • I haven't begged for books in a long time. . .and despite this lapse in mendicancy on my part, several of you generous folks continue to fire books my way.

    Book Beggin' 2009

  • I haven't begged for books in a long time. . .and despite this lapse in mendicancy on my part, several of you generous folks continue to fire books my way.

    Archive 2009-07-05 2009

  • He established a system of poor relief, taxed the nobles and the clergy to pay its costs, and then made mendicancy a crime.

    Charlemagne, King of the Franks, 28 Jan 814 de Brantigny........................ 2009

  • The unconquered Hercules himself, since you despise my instances as drawn from mere mendicancy, Hercules that roamed the whole world, exterminated monsters, and conquered races, god though he was, had but a skin for raiment and a staff for company in the days when he wandered through the earth.

    The Defense Apuleius 2008

  • Regarding the Roma minority, the decree does not include new rules, except for rougher sentences for those who practice mendicancy involving children - up to 3 years in jail and decay from parental rights, in case the minors put to beg are their children.

    Romanians in Italy already found an antidote against Berlusconi: one-day trips to San Marino 2008

  • (Zakát): thus he avoided the shame and scandal of mendicancy which, beginning in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe, extends to

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • The unconquered Hercules himself, since you despise my instances as drawn from mere mendicancy, Hercules that roamed the whole world, exterminated monsters, and conquered races, god though he was, had but a skin for raiment and a staff for company in the days when he wandered through the earth.

    The Defense Apuleius 2008

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