MERCHANT

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does merchant mean? 

• MERCHANT (noun)
  The noun MERCHANT has 1 sense:

1. a businessperson engaged in retail trade

  Familiarity information: MERCHANT used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• MERCHANT (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A businessperson engaged in retail trade

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

merchandiser; merchant

Hypernyms ("merchant" is a kind of...):

bourgeois; businessperson (a capitalist who engages in industrial commercial enterprise)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "merchant"):

book seller; bookdealer (a dealer in books; a merchant who sells books)

vintner; wine merchant (someone who sells wine)

merchant-venturer; venturer (a merchant who undertakes a trading venture (especially a venture that sends goods overseas))

bargainer; dealer; monger; trader (someone who purchases and maintains an inventory of goods to be sold)

stationer; stationery seller (a merchant who sells writing materials and office supplies)

market keeper; shopkeeper; storekeeper; tradesman (a merchant who owns or manages a shop)

marketer; seller; trafficker; vender; vendor (someone who promotes or exchanges goods or services for money)

schlockmeister; shlockmeister ((slang) a merchant who deals in shoddy or inferior merchandise)

salt merchant; salter (someone who makes or deals in salt)

rug merchant (a merchant who sells rugs)

retail merchant; retailer (a merchant who sells goods at retail)

poulterer; poultryman (a dealer in poultry and poultry products)

jeweler; jeweller (someone in the business of selling jewelry)

hatmaker; hatter; milliner; modiste (someone who makes and sells hats)

grocer (a retail merchant who sells foodstuffs (and some household supplies))

grain merchant (a merchant who deals in food grains)

clothier; haberdasher (a merchant who sells men's clothing)

butcher; meatman (a retailer of meat)

baker (someone who bakes commercially)

Instance hyponyms:

Charles Henry Harrod; Harrod (English merchant who took over a shop in London that was expanded by his son into a prestigious department store (1800-1885))

Charles Digby Harrod; Harrod (English merchant who expanded his father's shop in London into a prestigious department store (1841-1905))

 Context examples 

There was once a merchant who had only one child, a son, that was very young, and barely able to run alone.

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

“Yet it is not my trade,” answered the merchant.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant of Geneva.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

I am a beauty-merchant, a trader in song, and I pursue utility, dear Madge.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

I'm afraid I am a shrewd merchant, peering into the scales, trying to weigh your love and find out what manner of thing it is.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

My Robert believes he was a wine-merchant.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He wants me to be an India merchant, as he was, and I'd rather be shot.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Here, in a broad thoroughfare, once the abode of wealthy City merchants, we found the sculpture works for which we searched.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I am a hop merchant myself, and as I have an income of seven or eight hundred, we found ourselves comfortably off, and took a nice eighty-pound-a-year villa at Norbury.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

These preparations happily completed, I bought a little dessert in Covent Garden Market, and gave a rather extensive order at a retail wine-merchant's in that vicinity.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)