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Middleman   /mˈɪdəlmˌæn/   Listen
Middleman

noun
(pl. middlemen)
1.
Someone who buys large quantities of goods and resells to merchants rather than to the ultimate customers.  Synonyms: jobber, wholesaler.
2.
The performer in the middle of a minstrel line who engages the others in talk.  Synonym: interlocutor.
3.
A person who is in a position to give you special assistance.  Synonym: contact.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Middleman" Quotes from Famous Books



... begging. Such conditions are ruinous to trade. Growers are disappointed and ascribe the cause to the commission man. Consumers are unable many times to profit by a glut in the market but promptly blame the middleman or the grower when the supply is ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt

... little farm about seven miles from the city limits, and the tenant on it says that nearly every Sunday somebody motors out from town and wants a chicken-and-waffle supper. There ain't much in the nursery business anymore. These landscape fellows buy their stuff direct, and the middleman's out. I've got a good orchard, and there's a spring, so I could put running water in the house. I'd be good to you, Tillie,—I swear it. It'd be just the same as marriage. Nobody need ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... these elements—that can with equal justice be called the parasitic or the middleman class—consisted in itself of several sorts of people. The nucleus was a small, intellectually honest set of men who believed, in the law per se, in the sacredness of formal institutions in the constitution, and in the subservience ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... this new phenomenon in our business life? In certain particulars the Standard Oil monopoly was the product of well-understood principles. From his earliest days John D. Rockefeller had struggled to eliminate the middleman. He established factories to build his own barrels, to make his own acids; he created his own selling firms, and, instead of paying large storage charges, he constructed his own warehouses in New York. From his earliest days as a refiner, he had adopted the principle of paying no ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... autosuggestion and imitation can bring themselves into ecstatic convulsions. They alone know from the gods the means to treat diseases and their personal influence overcomes the ailment. In early America, before the European discovery, the cure of disease belonged in the same way to the middleman between the gods and human beings. In the Antilles, for instance, the bohuti heals the diseases which are regarded as punishments of the gods for human neglect. The priest by inhaling a certain powder brings himself into an ecstatic condition, then presses the painful organs of ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... of buying pictures. The other artists laughed and asked for the gentleman's address. Then they fell foul of the picture dealers, dirty black-guards, who preyed on artists and starved them. It was really a pity that connoisseurs mistrusted painters to such a degree as to insist upon a middleman under the impression that they would thus make a better bargain. This question of bread and butter excited them yet more, though Claude showed magnificent contempt for it all. The artist was robbed, no doubt, but what did that matter, if he had painted a masterpiece, and had some water to drink? ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... Jew is not a producer, but is a mere middleman, taking a profit as goods pass from hand to hand, is handed down from the time when Jews were forbidden by law to become producers and, therefore, were compelled to become traders and middlemen, barred from the guilds and from engaging in the ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... in commerce it partly supplanted the older system and partly entered into new paths. In the Middle Ages domestic, and to some extent international, commerce was carried on by fairs adapted to bring producer and consumer together and hence reduce the functions of middleman to the narrowest limits. Such was the annual fair at Stourbridge; such the famous bookmart at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and such were the fairs in Lyons, Antwerp, and many other cities. Only in the larger towns was a market perpetually ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... economic independence that he had under the old guild system where he acted both as merchant and manufacturer. He now received his raw material from the merchant and disposed of the finished goods to a middleman, who looked after ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley

... I did not get his story, but I got a thrilling picture of the recent generation in American letters—I, being the public; the truth of his story representing the producer, and the miserable thing he fancied I was ready for, being the middleman's part. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... soon had to yield to the lowered prices occasioned by the importation of beef from western grazing lands. The making of butter and cheese, with the increased cost of labor on the farms, was abandoned, that the milk might be sold in bulk to the city middleman. The time had not come, however, in which farmers or their laborers imported condensed milk, or used none. Quaker Hill farmers lived too generously and substantially for that; but they ceased, during the Civil War, when milk was bought "at ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... until it was explained that she was anxious to undertake the poultry as a hobby. One of the carter boys was detailed to collect the eggs, as some of the hen-houses were in out-of-the-way corners of the yards and difficult to approach. My wife thought the middleman was appropriating most of the profit; she was determined to get as directly to the consumer as possible and, among others, she arranged with the head of a large school for a weekly supply of dairy and poultry produce. ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... withheld his hand. Canker felt very bitterly towards Ray, claiming that there was no officer in the regiment whom he had treated with such marked courtesy, and to this, when he heard it, Ray made response in his characteristic way. He would have no middleman. He went straight to Canker and said his say in few terse words: "You consider me unjustified in refusing to treat you as a friend, Captain Canker; now let us have no misunderstanding whatever. Your conduct towards my best ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King



Words linked to "Middleman" :   distributer, distributor, representative, jobber, packer, wholesaler, minstrel show, meat packer, minstrel, interlocutor, contact



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