The word 'mercenary' is correct and can be used in written English.
You can use it to describe someone who works for money or material gain, especially in a way that disregards loyalty or morality. For example, "The mercenary army was hired to fight in a foreign war."
If there was any naiveté in Jack's post, it wasn't in how the band spent their money but rather in his assumption that a compassionate universe was ready to accept his transparency as an important contribution to the music information economy instead of a mercenary gimmick promoting his own cause.
The British mercenary Simon Mann, who was sentenced to 34 years in prison in Equatorial Guinea last year for plotting to overthrow the oil-rich country's government, has been granted a presidential pardon.
He's about to take on an entire mercenary army.
Russia is deploying its propaganda apparatus to present this as an ideological struggle rather than a mercenary one.
A wealth of media reports, witness accounts and photos on social media suggest that he is not the only white mercenary who helped turn the tide against the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in recent weeks, allowing Nigeria to hold a relatively peaceful election.
And their wealth and income are at least as important in the calculus of courtship as personal tastes and sex appeal.Miss Austen was neither mercenary nor a snob.
The best-known mercenary outfit was Executive Outcomes, which in the 1990s fought rebels on behalf of Angola and Sierra Leone, to controversial but often impressive effect.
Above all, they see the chance of a stonking wedding to an impossibly attractive bride, a car, even a house, if a big ransom is paid.Although mercenary action is possible, direct foreign military intervention in Somalia in pursuit of pirates is unlikely in 2012 and probably futile, too.
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He is alarmed by the prospect, not least because he feels that in a truly free market mercenary armies might be encouraged to seek profits by starting new wars.The author fears that the world is entering an era of "neomedievalism" in which the state loses its monopoly of legal force and instead other wealthy groups or individuals fund private military adventures.
Most Iranians brushed off this speech as the usual stuff, typically peppered with references to journalists as "mercenary pen-pushers".
