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souteneur

noun · 1 senses · updated from the 2026-07-25 local source snapshot

Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.

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Pronunciation

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1

noun

Meaning 1

A man who protects, and commonly compels, a prostitute of any gender and lives off the earnings; a pimp. Originally a Parisian term, but since adopted into other languages such as English.

Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract

Examples

  • 1894 Richard Krafft-Ebing & Charles Gilbert Chaddock. Psychopathia Sexualis. p. 416 Pub. F.A.Davis These "souteneurs" attach their "jesus" to themselves. The passive pederasts are "petits jusus," "jesus," or "aunts." The "petits jesus" are lost, depraved children, whom accident places in the hands of active pederasts, who seduce them, and reveal to them the horrible means of earning a livelihood, either as "entretenus" or as male street-walkers, with or without "souteneurs." The most suitable and promising "petits jesus" are given into the hands of persons who instruct these children in the art of female dress and manner. Gradually they then seek to emancipate themselves from their teachers and masters, in order to become "femmes entretenues"; and not infrequently by means of anonymous denunciation of their "souteneurs" to the police. It is the object of the "souteneur" and the "petit jesus" to make the latter appear young, as long as possible, by means of all the arts of the toilet.
  • 1920 Aldous Huxley Limbo As long as the two parts of him kept well apart, as long as his male self could understand mathematics, and as long as his lady novelist’s self kept up her regular habit of writing at night and retiring from business during the day, the arrangement would be admirable... His life would arrange itself so easily and well. He would devote the day to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, to philosophy and mathematics... After midnight he would write novels with a feminine pen, earning the money that would make his unproductive male labours possible. A kind of spiritual souteneur... Like a gentleman of the East, he would sit still and smoke his philosophic pipe while the womenfolk did the dirty work.

Meaning relationships

Synonyms: none provided

Antonyms: none provided

History

Etymology

From French souteneur (literally “one who supports”), from the verb soutenir.