Noun

(en noun)

Total income or cash flow minus expenditures. The money or other benefit a non-governmental organization or individual receives in exchange for products and services sold at an advertised price.

* Rambler

Let no man anticipate uncertain profits .

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=68, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= T time , passage=The ability to shift profits' to low-tax countries by locating intellectual property in them, which is then licensed to related businesses in high-tax countries, is often assumed to be the preserve of high-tech companies. […] current tax rules make it easy for all sorts of firms to generate […] “stateless income”: ' profit subject to tax in a jurisdiction that is neither the location of the factors of production that generate the income nor where the parent firm is domiciled.}}

(dated, literary) Benefit, positive result obtained.

* Bible, 1 Corinthians vii. 35

This I speak for your own profit .

* Shakespeare

if you dare do yourself a profit and a right

(legal) In property law, a nonpossessory interest in land whereby a party is entitled to enter the land of another for the purpose of taking the soil or the substance of the soil (coal, oil, minerals, and in some jurisdictions timber and game).

Noun

(-)

money; riches; gain; especially when dishonestly acquired (compare lucre)

* 1906 , Frederick Tatham, Life of Blake'' in Archibald George Blomefield Russell (ed.), ''The Letters of William Blake :

But, sighing after his fancies and visionary pursuits, he rebelled and fled fifty miles away for refuge from the lace caps and powdered wigs of his priggish sitters, and resumed his quaint dreams and immeasurable phantasies, never more to forsake them for pelf and portraiture.

* February 20, 2000 , Nick Cohen, Without prejudice , The Observer:

. . . a master manipulator who will twist and dodge around the clock to keep the privileges of power and pelf .

* July 20, 1997 , Harriet P. Gross, Author roots her stories in Vietnam War , Dallas Morning News:

She writes about those she might have known first-hand: teenage girls cowering in bunkers . . . friends making promises they can never keep . . . rich folk fattened on wartime pelf , poor folk surviving by wit alone.

* April 27, 1987 , Ford S. Worthy, You're Probably Working Too Hard , Fortune:

In advertising, show business, and journalism, people work themselves to the nub for glitz and glory more than for pelf .

* October 1968 , Nicholas von Hoffman, The Class of '43 Is Puzzled , The Atlantic:

Some of the rich classmates were keeping their pelf to themselves.