Definition
Gain in money or goods; profit — particularly when obtained through morally questionable, base, or unworthy means. The term carries an inherent pejorative charge: lucre does not merely describe financial gain but implies that the gain is tainted, excessive, or corruptive in character. In legal texts, lucre appears most frequently in phrases such as "filthy lucre" or "lucre of gain," used to characterize improper financial motive as an aggravating factor in misconduct, or to distinguish lawful compensation from corrupt payment.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Money, riches, or wealth, especially when seen as having a corrupting effect or causing greed, or obtained in an underhanded manner.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Gain in money or goods; profit; riches — often in an ill sense. "The lust of lucre and the dread of death." — Pope.
The gap between common and legal usage here is narrow but worth noting. In ordinary language, lucre is almost always used pejoratively and somewhat informally. In legal sources, the term performs a specific function: it signals improper financial motive rather than simply describing wealth. A legal text invoking lucre is making a normative claim about the quality of the gain, not merely its quantity.
Common Confusion
Lucre is sometimes read as a synonym for profit, compensation, or remuneration. It is none of these. Those terms are neutral; lucre is not. When historical legal sources distinguish between services rendered "for lucre" versus services rendered in a professional or fiduciary capacity, the distinction is doing moral and legal work — not merely descriptive work. Misreading lucre as neutral can cause a researcher to miss the evaluative claim embedded in the source text.
Why It Matters in Research
Lucre is a term of moral coloring, not a technical term of art, and researchers should approach it accordingly. Its appearances in legal texts are rarely definitional — they are rhetorical and evaluative. When you encounter lucre in a historical statute, pleading, or judicial opinion, the author is signaling corrupt or base financial motivation, not merely describing a monetary transaction.
In ecclesiastical law and early common law contexts, lucre appears in discussions of simony (the buying and selling of church offices or spiritual benefits), usury, and barratry — areas where the law sought to police improper financial motive. Researchers working in these areas should expect lucre to appear as a marker of the very conduct being condemned.
In American legal history, the phrase "not for lucre but for love" (or its variants) appears in instrument drafting and testimonial contexts to establish disinterested motive — a contrast that only makes sense because lucre implies the opposite. Researchers reading instruments or affidavits containing this formulation should understand it as a legal distancing move, not mere rhetorical flourish.
The term becomes sparse in modern legal drafting, where more precise language (improper financial motive, corrupt payment, unlawful gain) has largely displaced it. Finding lucre in a modern legal text is itself informative — it usually signals either historical quotation, ecclesiastical context, or archaic statutory language being preserved.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary carry identical entries for lucre, both attributing the definition to Webster rather than to case law or statute — a telling acknowledgment that lucre is not a technical legal term with a court-developed meaning, but a term imported from common usage into legal texts for its moral freight. The consistency across editions reflects that the term's legal meaning never evolved independently of its common meaning; it remained anchored to the ordinary pejorative sense throughout.
Neither Black's edition attempts to define the threshold at which gain becomes lucre, nor offers a legal test for distinguishing lucre from legitimate profit. This is not an oversight — it reflects the nature of the term. Lucre operates by implication and context rather than by definition. Historical legal dictionaries are of limited navigational use here; the more valuable sources are the primary texts in which lucre appears, read in their specific doctrinal context.
Webster's 1913 and the legal dictionaries are in agreement on the core sense. None of these sources, however, captures the specific legal deployments of the term — its role in ecclesiastical law, its appearance in barratry and simony doctrine, or its use as a rhetorical device in pleadings and instruments.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: Simony; Barratry; Usury