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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
courtier
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ As archbishop of Toledo, he chased the fawning courtiers from his palace and stripped it of finery.
▪ For court musicians were at once household servants and courtiers, suitors for office.
▪ He was neither a plotter nor a courtier.
▪ Lonely Diana decided to set up her own select circle of trusted courtiers, male and female.
▪ Senior courtiers went to await the arrival of the train at the capital.
▪ The Duchess had never been liked by many courtiers and members of the Royal Household since the day of the engagement.
▪ The King and his courtiers started at the sight of Kabir when he entered the hall.
▪ Until the 1890s, the garden was reserved for the exclusive use of either the monarch or selected courtiers.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Courtier

Courtier \Court"ier\ (k[=o]rt"y[~e]r), n. [From Court.]

  1. One who is in attendance at the court of a prince; one who has an appointment at court.

    You know I am no courtier, nor versed in state affairs.
    --Bacon.

    This courtier got a frigate, and that a company.
    --Macaulay.

  2. One who courts or solicits favor; one who flatters.

    There was not among all our princes a greater courtier of the people than Richard III.
    --Suckling.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
courtier

early 13c., from Anglo-French *corteour, from Old French cortoiier "to be at court, live at court" (see court (n.)).

Wiktionary
courtier

n. 1 A person in attendance at a royal court. 2 A person who flatters in order to seek favour.

WordNet
courtier

n. an attendant at the court of a sovereign

Wikipedia
Courtier

A courtier (; ) is a person who is often in attendance at the court of a king or other royal personage. The earliest historical examples of courtiers were part of the retinues of rulers. Historically the court was the centre of government as well as the residence of the monarch, and the social and political life were often completely mixed together.

Usage examples of "courtier".

Its aestheticism, exclusivity, and promise of realizing through arcane practices the buddha nature in this life were irresistible to the courtiers.

And Furvain, glancing for just a moment into his wine-bowl as though some poem might be lurking there, would draw a deep breath and instantaneously begin to recite a mock epic, in neatly balanced hexameter and the most elaborate of anapestic rhythms, about the desperate craving of a Pontifex for sausage made of steetmoy meat, and the sending of the laziest and most cowardly of the royal courtiers on a hunting expedition to the snowbound lair of that ferocious white-furred creature of northern Zimroel.

THE QUEEN AND HER COURTIERS, left somewhat to their own devices, were teaching London to emulate the most famous centers of civility in Christendom, Henry, chiefly abroad, was occupied with Angevin problems of another sort.

Yoshitomo made his way through the hills to Lake Biwa, Vice-Councilor Nobuyori, prime agent in the plot to snatch power from Kiyomori, escaped to Ninna-ji Temple, north of the city gates, where nearly fifty of his fellow noblemen and courtiers had already taken refuge.

Discovering among the courtiers a friend named Philobone, a chamberwoman to the Queen, Philogenet is led by her into a circular temple, where, in a tabernacle, sits Venus, with Cupid by her side.

He was depicted by the satirical cartoonist Cruikshank as sitting on a fat cushion amidst the splendid chinoiserie of one of his many saloons, holding court while fawning courtiers, all in kimonos, bowed to him.

Courts of Love in France, places the reasonable and modest wish of a sensitive and chaste lady above all the eagerness of her lovers, all the incongruous counsels of representative courtiers.

Whether it was his cries, or the, to them, awful sound and effect of the pistol shot, or what, I know not, but the other priests halted, paralysed and dismayed, and before they could come on again Sorais had called out something, and we, together with the two Queens and most of the courtiers, were being surrounded with a wall of armed men.

She felt, as courtiers do when the Tsar enters, the sensation of fear and respect which the old man inspired in all around him.

The essential requirement is to remember that Lyly the dramatist is the same man as Lyly the euphuist, and that his audience was always a company of courtiers, with Queen Elizabeth in their midst, infatuated with admiration for the new phraseology and mode of thought known as Euphuism.

By the expedient of honorary codicils, the emperors, who were fond of multiplying their favors, might sometimes gratify the vanity, though not the ambition, of impatient courtiers.

And indeed in the Heian period the exceptional visual attraction of the mandalas and other Shingon icons greatly helped to endear esotericism to the Kyoto courtiers, who were finely sensitive to beauty in all its forms.

It is not surprising, then, that the Heian courtiers found congenial a sect like Shingon, which similarly asserted a fixed hierarchy among its pantheon of deities headed by Dainichi.

To accept and occupy a provincial post, the courtier was obliged not only to forsake the comforts and cultural attractions of the Heian capital, but also to suffer diminished status and even risk social opprobrium.

Chinese ideographs to represent Japanese phonetics, and the Heian courtiers found it obscure and difficult to read.