commercial

plural commercials

1. An advertisement in a common media format, usually radio or television.

   She was in a commercial for breakfast cereal.

2. businessA commercial trader, as opposed to an individual speculator.
3. obsoleteA commercial traveller.

   I have more than once had to lend a commercial money to pay his fare home; as he had played shell-out and lost the lot.

   1875, George Worsley, Advice to the Young!, page 32

   2 more examples

   Five persons went to the house after the milkman was gone, and that there Arab party was safe inside, — three of them was commercials, that I know, because afterwards they came to me.

   1897, Richard Marsh, The Beetle

   ‘I’ve seen him take things and lift them into a dray - things that - that - that - well, that you and me together couldn’t lift an inch!’ ‘Go on!’ and the commercial again squinted in the direction of Dan.

   1911, ‘Steel Rudd’, The Book of Dan, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, published 1970, page 84

4. slangA male prostitute.

   Tom said that homosexuals hate “commercials,” male prostitutes, and if the homosexual was drunk and angry, he might have committed murder.

   1972, Alfred Eustace Parker, The Berkeley Police Story, page 133

   1 more example

   With the commercials there is no intensity of feeling and no later animosity; there is emotional and sexual fakery, but no prolonged post-sexual bargaining. […] Paradoxically these boys dissociate themselves from the commercials, yet engage in prostitution only when they require the money.

   1987, Paul William Mathews, Male Prostitution: Two Monographs, page 39

comparative more commercial · superlative most commercial

1. Of or pertaining to commerce.

   A two minutes' walk brought Warwick--the name he had registered under, and as we shall call him--to the market-house, the central feature of Patesville, from both the commercial and the picturesque points of view.

   1900, Charles W[addell] Chesnutt, chapter I, in The House Behind the Cedars, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company […], →OCLC

2. aeronauticsDesignating an airport that serves passenger and/or cargo flights.
3. aeronauticsDesignating such an airplane flight.