An athlete who plays for pay

Usage examples of professional.

But Jonson gave dramatic value to the masque, especially in his invention of the antimasque, a comedy or farcical element of relief, entrusted to professional players or dancers.

They were certainly much closer to the People so freely apostrophized by the Third Estate than the lawyers, functionaries and professional men who made up that body.

There is not a great deal of hope for assimilationist policies to be found in the professional Mexican-American leadership that thrives in government, journalism and the universities.

He thought he looked appropriately serious in his one decent suit even if Carol had told him it made him look like a time-warped professional foot baller But not even she could fault his dove grey shirt and dark magenta tie, he decided.

American poet with a beard and tufted eyebrows: Gerald, a professional beatnik from the western United States.

Most of his previous partners had probably been besotted with him, or paid by him, but she was a professional woman, with a mind of her own.

Quintus Bland, his professional interest overcoming his low spirits for the moment.

The new technology of radio had forced briskness and brevity on professional speakers, such as politicians, who were accustomed to orating on the stump for three hours at a stretch, and preachers, sometimes drilling words into their listeners at speeds that reached two hundred words a minute.

If a Harry Broll can damned near kill you, Travis, what about somebody with a more professional attitude and background?

If soft, sloppy, nervous Harry Broll could almost do me in with a pop gun, my next meeting with professional talent could be mortal.

He was a professional, and all the fighting brutishness of him was reserved for his professional appearances.

The socialist welfare concerns of the early 1920s gave way to the rightwing political agenda, and the professional and social ideologies growing out of the eugenics movement embraced an exclusionary and vicious assault on sick bodies, disabled limbs, and individual lifestyles that ran counter to Volkish ideals.

Smith readily agreed to do a series of novelettes constructed around the character Neal Cloud, a professional blaster of atomic vortices from power plants out of control, an extrapolation of the business of dynamiting blazing oil wells.

The most effective way to acquire such knowledge is by a concerted, collaborative effort on the part of professional cognitive scientists and professional contemplatives, using their combined extraspective and introspective skills to tackle the hard problem of consciousness.

We passed and bowed to the eschatologists, cetics, akashics, horologes, the professionals and academicians of our Order.