Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A person of slavish or unquestioning obedience; a lackey.
- noun One who does menial or trivial work; a drudge.
- noun A liveried manservant.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A cabin waiter on a passenger-vessel.
- noun A male servant in livery: used in contempt.
- noun Hence One who is mean and base-spirited; a cringing flatterer and servile imitator of those above him in rank or position; a toady; a snob.
- noun In the United States, among stock-brokers, a person who, from inexperience, makes bad investments or loses his money.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A contemptuous name for a liveried servant or a footman.
- noun One who is obsequious or cringing; a snob.
- noun Cant, U.S. One easily deceived in buying stocks; an inexperienced and unwary jobber.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
sycophant ; a servant orhanger-on who is kept for their loyalty or muscle rather than their intellect.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a male servant (especially a footman)
- noun a person of unquestioning obedience
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Thackeray's studies of the flunky are capital; but he studies him _qua flunky_, as a naturalist might study an animal, and hardly ranks him _sub specie humanitatis_.
Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 6 Lucia Isabella Gilbert Runkle 1864
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An offshoot of a failed GOP flunky from the last elections.
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New York record-label flunky Garrett (Long) manages to score with Erin (Barrymore), a Stanford journalism grad student in the final weeks of her summer internship at something called "the New York Sentinel."
Variety.com 2010
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How much cash do you have in the bank compared to this man you call a flunky?
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How much cash do you have in the bank compared to this man you call a flunky?
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The only thing I see is at least once a week there’s some flunky from the Administration giving everybody the full Herbert ….
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They mow down four hoods to get to the mobster’s main flunky, then they breakout the ol’ can of whoopass on a few more hoods in order to get to the same flunky.
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How much cash do you have in the bank compared to this man you call a flunky? "
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Apparently the "flunky" was actually a fellow House member.
White Cower 2009
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The book was created during a period in the 1960s when Feinstein was a 20-something "flunky" at a movie studio.
Bob Dylan poems discovered. Joan Druett 2008
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