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Lackey   /lˈæki/   Listen
Lackey

noun
(pl. lackeys)
1.
A male servant (especially a footman).  Synonyms: flunkey, flunky.
2.
A person who tries to please someone in order to gain a personal advantage.  Synonyms: ass-kisser, crawler, sycophant, toady.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Lackey" Quotes from Famous Books



... won't want it again," replied the lackey, looking knowingly at his master. He hated George too, whose insolence towards him was ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the lackey who had but lately returned from Guildford, whilst sitting over the kitchen fire with his cup of mead, had complained of sudden and violent pains, had vomited and fallen down upon the floor in a fit; whereat every person present had fled in wild dismay, perfectly certain ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... kills a rather harmless coxcomb of a marquis who rebukes him for making this tapage; and such a still greater brute (for in the duel he had himself been wounded) that he throws out of the window an unfortunate lackey who gets in his way at a party where Octave has, as usual, lost his temper. Finally, he is a combination of prig, sneak, cad, brute, and fool when (having picked up and read a forged letter which is not addressed ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... continued the postilion, 'I was sent, under the guidance of a lackey of the place, with a letter, which the priest, when he left, had given us for a friend of his in the Eternal City. We went to a large house, and on ringing were admitted by a porter into a cloister, where I saw some ill-looking, shabby young fellows walking about, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... together during the evening. What is to be the end of this? To-morrow I go to see Miss Courtland, and I have made up my mind to confess everything. Perhaps she will think no worse of me. The queen still loved Ruy Blas after she found he was a lackey. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various

... de Joinville was absent, as was also his wife. It was said that lately he was the hero of a love affair. M. de Joinville is prodigiously strong. I heard a big lackey behind me say: "I shouldn't care to receive a slap from him." While he was strolling to his rendezvous M. de Joinville thought he noticed that he was being followed. He turned back, went up to the ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... lackey, from the rise to set, Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse, And follows so the ever-running year With profitable labor to his grave. And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, Winding up days with toil and nights with ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... her time. Willibald, accustomed to confide in his mother, had told her of his meeting with Fraeulein Volkmar, and how he had enacted the part of porter at her suggestion. Frau von Eschenhagen was, naturally enough, incensed at the thought that her son, the heir of Burgsdorf, should act as lackey for a "theatrical hussy." She drew, for his benefit, a picture of this child of the devil, and explained how it would be an impossibility for her to follow such a shameless life without being thoroughly bad. Willibald, of course, was horror stricken at what he heard, and agreed fully ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... it is that his strength was all in his lungs, and himself a poor, weak, clout-faced, wizen-bellied, pin-shanked bloke anyway, who at Trinity Hall had spent the most of his time in reading Hume (that was Satan's lackey) and after taking his degree did a little in the way of Imperial Finance. Of him it was that Lord Abraham Hart, that far-seeing statesman, said, "This young man has the root of the matter in him." I quote ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm

... eating sweeties in kirk; and, with a palpable effort, she swallowed it whole, and her colour flamed high. At this signal of distress Archie awoke to a sense of his ill-behaviour. What had he been doing? He had been exquisitely rude in church to the niece of his housekeeper; he had stared like a lackey and a libertine at a beautiful and modest girl. It was possible, it was even likely, he would be presented to her after service in the kirk-yard, and then how was he to look? And there was no excuse. He had marked the tokens of her shame, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a tall dappled horse, and a retinue of six lackeys in silver and black liveries came cantering after him, and the two foremost lackeys carried in knapsacks, marked with a gold coronet, the images which Dom Manuel had made. A third lackey carried Dom Manuel's shield, upon which were emblazoned the arms of Poictesme. The black shield displayed a silver stallion which was rampant in every member and was bridled with gold, but the ancient arms had been given ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... atmosphere of compromise, to keep honour bright and abstain from base capitulations? How are you to put aside love's pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn suddenly about into the rabbi of precision; and after these years of ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who has found you out? In this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to morality in married life. Daily they drop a little lower from the first ideal, and for a while continue to accept these changelings with a gross complacency. ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a very strange thing," said he, bitterly, "to prosecute me as they do; my trial is a mere question of hay, straw, wood, stones, and lime; there is not case enough for whipping a lackey." ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... seemed to consider that he handed the Legation over to them, and he told Mrs. Lee, with true British bluntness of speech, that they were a great bore and he wished they had stayed in Saxe-Baden-Hombourg, or wherever they belonged, but as they were here, he must be their lackey. Mrs. Lee was amused and a little astonished at the candour with which he talked about them, and she was instructed and improved by his dry account of the Princess, who, it seemed, made herself disagreeable ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... him, but on the perron of the servants' quarters appeared two bare-footed women with tucked-up skirts, carrying buckets, who were apparently scrubbing floors. She was not on the front perron, either; only Timon, the lackey, came forth in an apron, also apparently occupied with cleaning. Sophia Ivanovna came into the ante-chamber, attired in a silk ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy

... She passed the lackey into a luxurious apartment, Marshal Bazaine's private cabinet. At one end there was a Japanese screen with a lamp behind, and at intervals came the sound of someone turning the leaves of a book. But Berthe thought solely of her errand. The marshal, thick ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... here, Sal. I've got hold of a cull or I shouldn't be in this lackey's coat. The fool's bursting with gold and he wants someone to help him to spend it. I'll be hanged if there's another woman in London like you for that fun. Now's your chance. He's sweet on a wench—a raw boarding school miss—he ran off with her ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce

... straw could be found, if one had a hundred eyes. When I passed through the streets there was a profound silence. Now and then an aristocratic carriage rolled past me almost noiselessly over the brick pavement, or I saw some stiff lackey standing at a door, or the fair head of some lady behind a curtain. As I walked close to the windows, I could see out of the corner of my eye my shabby travelling-clothes reflected clearly in the large panes of glass, and I repented not having brought my gloves, and felt a certain sense ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... not watch her for a whole week at Saumur? 'Tis well we have not Aramon and the rest with us. The fewer there are the larger the shares. Can Malsain deal with the lackey?" ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats

... his. Ha! it is but ten lines long. 'Dearest Achille, how I long for you to come back! The court is as dull as a cloister now that you are gone. My ridiculous father still struts about like a turkey-cock, as if all his medals and crosses could cover the fact that he is but a head lackey, with no more real power than I have. He wheedles a good deal out of the king, but what he does with it I cannot imagine, for little comes my way. I still owe those ten thousand livres to the man in the Rue Orfevre. Unless I have some luck at lansquenet, I shall have to come out soon and join ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle

... drew up before the Dauphin. A grenadier-lackey, who seemed bulk and brass buttons and braid of gold, handed them out with august ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott

... so ornamented, with crowds of swinging chairmen, with servants bawling to clear the way, with Mr. Dean in his cassock, his lackey marching before him; or Mrs. Dinah in her sack, tripping to chapel, her footboy carrying her ladyship's great prayer book; with itinerant tradesmen, singing their hundred cries (I remember forty years ago, as a ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... ungloved!—it shakes, 'tis true, But mark its tiny size, (High birth's true sign) and shape, as on The lackey's arm it lies. That hand ne'er penned a useful line, Ne'er worked a deed of fame, Save slaying one, whose sister he— Its owner—brought ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... the back he Feels fit for scourge or brand, No scurril scribes that lackey The lords of Lackeyland, No penman that yearns, as he turns on his pallet, For the place or the pence of a peer or a valet, No whelp of as currish a pack As the litter whose yelp it gives back, Though he answer the cry of his brother As echoes might answer from ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... fatality of this sort in your conduct," responded Varhely, coldly, "and that your lackey did not understand your commands: the deed which you committed was none the less that of a coward. You used as a weapon the letters of a woman, and of a woman whom you had deceived by promising her your name when it was no longer yours ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie

... up. "But we lost an Assassin: discarnating this lackey won't equalize that. We think you should retire one of ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper

... not the Billingtons, worshipful Master Howland, lackey of the governor, and page-boy to his wife," demanded the voice that had interrupted Mistress Hopkins, and turning toward it, Howland confronted a short, square woman, not without a certain vulgar comeliness of her own, although now her buxom complexion was florid ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... hup. The mud's no respecter h'of an H'english gentleman nor h'an American millionaire, don'cher know?" and the pompous Mr. Devonshire handed his hand-grip to Job, while he poked out his shoes for the gray-haired lackey to ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher

... a sense of the formidable power of the lackey who can accuse or condemn his masters by a word; he coolly opened the door by which the man had just entered the ante-chamber, meaning, no doubt, to show these insolent flunkeys that he was familiar with the house; but he found ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac

... and you will be the apologist of every infamy that wears a Liberal or Catholic mask. You, too, will speak of the portraits of Vecelli and the Assumption of Allegri, and declare that Democracy refuses to lackey-label these honest citizens as Titian and Correggio. Even that colossal fragment of your ruined honesty that still stupendously dismisses Beethoven as "some rubbish about a piano" will give way to remarks about "a graceful second subject in the relative minor." ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... to find. He was soon there; gave his horse to one of the farm-boys, and went into the kitchen and asked if Miss Fountain lived there. This question threw him into the hands of Jenny, who invited him to follow her, and, unlike your powdered and noiseless lackey, pounded the door with her fist, kicked it open with her foot, and announced him with that thunderbolt of language which fell ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade

... that I must be drunk or insane, but my serious mood and energetic investigations soon altered that notion. I might myself have doubted my mental soundness had it not been for the cross in my hand, which I at once recognized as being that worn by the nun, and had not a lackey finally confessed to having beheld the strange figure. He was coming from the colonnade with a tray of refreshments when he saw me in conversation with her. The mask had something familiar about her, he said, but he could not remember where he had seen ...
— The Gray Nun • Nataly Von Eschstruth

... you shall be my lackey,—the chief messenger," laughed Blackbeard, showing his yellow teeth. "Hat in ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... afterwards, while he takes his afternoon-ride towards Charlottenburg, or saunters along Unter-den-Linden, ogling the pretty English girls, and spying every chance of saluting, whenever a royal equipage, preceded by a monkey-looking lackey, rolls by. These are, of course, exceptions, rarer in the present than formerly. In Padua, in the sixteenth century, it became notorious that the richer students never attended in person, but always sent one of their servants who wrote a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... The lackey in knee-breeches and yellow stockings who answered the inside bell was almost speechless at the sight of the white face which confronted him at the door. No, the Baron was not at home. He had not been there since early in the evening. Had he gone to the Prefettura? Possibly. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... the fields, reckoning no longer in dozens of rubles but in dozens of thousands! Indeed, Turkletaub Brothers could now afford to owe the bank one hundred thousand dollars! Mosher dwelling thus, thighs gone flabby, in a seven-story apartment house with a liveried lackey to swing open the front door and another to shoot him upward in a ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... the rejoicing lackey had disappeared, "having secured the future, we can afford to be more lenient with the past. I am not in an official position, and there is no reason, so long as the ends of justice are served, why I should disclose all that I know. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... 'the lackey to eternity,' and Death be the porter of heaven's gate, and we shall pass from the land of setting suns and waning moons and change and sorrow, to that land where 'thy sun shall no more go down,' and 'there ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... Salicetti was too prominent a partizan to be overlooked by the angry burghers. For a time he was concealed by Mme. Permon in her Paris home. He escaped the vengeance of his enemies in the disguise of her lackey, flying with her when she left for the south to seek refuge for herself and children. Even the rank and file among the members of the Mountain either fled or were arrested. That Buonaparte was unmolested appears to prove how cleverly he had concealed his ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... fire in no time. I wonder you don't show him that respect—it wouldn't hurt you one morsel, I guess.' Says he, quite miffy like, 'Don't he know the way to court as well as I do? If I thought he didn't, I'd send one of my niggers to show him the road. I wonder who was his lackey last year, that he wants me to be his'n this time. It don't convene to one of our free and enlightened citizens, to tag arter any man, that's a fact; it's too English and too foreign for our glorious institutions. He's bound by law to be ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... erring brain. From Freedom's field the recreant Horace flies To kiss the hand by which his country dies; From Mary's grave the mighty Peasant turns, And hoarse with orgies rings the laugh of Burns. While Rousseau's lips a lackey's vices own,— Lips that could draw the thunder on a throne! But when from Life the Actual GENIUS springs, When, self-transformed by its own magic rod, It snaps the fetters and expands the wings, And drops the fleshly garb that veiled the god, How the mists vanish as the form ascends! How ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... you, and fulfilling the ideas which you concrete in your journals, we public men are servants of the general animus, which in its turn serves the blind and burning instinct of justice. This is eminently satisfactory to me, who would wish no better fate than to be a humble lackey in that house." He had no sooner, however, spoken those words than Joe Petty's remarks about Public Opinion came back to him, and he added: "But are you really the general animus, or are you only the animus of Mayors, that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... attendant was immediately at hand. My Lord Marlborough—the most talked of man in Europe, and some say, at this juncture, as powerful as half a dozen Kings—rose and handed his Majesty the piece of linen as simply as if it were but becoming that he should serve as lackey a royalty so important—and with such repose of natural dignity that 'twas he who seemed majestic, and not the man he waited on. Since then all goes with comparative smoothness. If a Queen's favoured counsellor and greatest ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... "A lackey!" he returned passionately throwing up his arm, "what is there in this for you, what are you trying to do to me? ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... every step. In a little, they became certainty. Up a shallow and winding stair, along a long and broad corridor, hung with rich tapestries, the polished parquet glistening faintly in the dim light, through splendid suites of gilded apartments with old pictures and splendid furniture... here a lackey with powdered hair yawning on a landing, there a sentry in field-grey immobile before a door...I was ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... pushed us to the edge of road and covered all with dust. He waited until the cloud sank, then he said, "Do you know—but you cannot know what it is to be sent from pillar to post and wait in antechambers where the air stifles, and doff cap—who have been captain of ships!—to chamberlain, page and lackey? To be called dreamer, adventurer, dicer! To hear the laugh and catch the sneer! To be the persuader, the beggar of good and bad, high and low—to beg year in and year out, cold and warmth, summer and winter, sunrise, noon and sunset, calm and storm, beg of galleon and beg of carrack, yea, beg of ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... declared; and his manner might well have become the dress of Buckingham. "Lord Strings is not your lackey this season." ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.

... once he had reached the Mall, in finding Lord Claud's rooms; for everybody knew where they were situated, and looked with some respect upon Tom for inquiring. He was received at the door by a very fine lackey, and taken up a wide staircase, so richly carpeted that the footfall could not be heard upon it. Everywhere his eyes rested upon strange and costly products of foreign lands, such as he had never dreamed ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green



Words linked to "Lackey" :   truckler, groveller, retainer, servant, fawner, bootlicker, flatterer, groveler, goody-goody, flunky, apple polisher, crawler, adulator



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