solicitant

plural solicitants

1. One who solicits.

   Solicitants for office besiege him, and he of course finds his hands full for the present.

   2013, Walter Stahr, Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man, page 258

   4 more examples

   The ante-chambers of the President are daily thronged with solicitants—with men who think they helped to make the President, and who are consequently of opinion that the President should help to make them.

   1859, Charles Mackay, Life and Liberty in America, page 83

   The communication between the medium and the human solicitants, described by both the medium and Pu, was conducted through informal yet polite conversation.

   2006, Xiofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China

   In 1592, the papacy assigned the Inquisition jurisdiction over solicitation among the clergy; it thus enabled the Holy Office to pursue solicitation and solicitants in the peninsula and the oversea dominions.

   2008, Asunción Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico

   But delicate as it was, it was this connection between solicitants and a bundle of papers somewhere in the IBR system that made landownership official.

   2011, Kregg Hetherington, Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay, page 108

2. historicalCatholicismA priest who abused the confessional to solicit women.

   Solicitant, one who, abusing the privacy of the confessional, tempts women to a violation of chastity.

   1894, James Strong, Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, volume 9, page 861

   2 more examples

   How like to the conduct of a Titular Bishop of Derry, who, when a Priest was accused of the crime of "solicitant at confession," expressed his abhorrence of the offence, and punished the offender by removing him to a better parish!

   1840, The Orthodox Presbyterian Theological Review and Missionary Recorder

   That the Confessional has been grossly used for immoral purposes, by evil-disposed priests, and that to a gigantic extent in the Church of Rom, is amply proved, beyond the possibility of refutation, by the Bulls of the Popes themselves against solicitant priests.

   1898, Walter Walsh, The Secret History of the Oxford Movement, page 118