What is a mendicant?

Answer 1

The term mendicant refers to begging or relying on charitable donations, and is most widely used for religious followers or ascetics who rely exclusively on charity to survive.

Mendicant orders or followers do not own property, either individually or collectively, and have taken a vow of poverty, in order that all their time and energy could be expended on preaching their religion or way of life and serving the poor. Some mendicants include Catholic mendicant orders, Hindu ascetics, some dervishes of Sufi Islam, and monastic schools of Buddhism where the mendicant tradition still survives, particularly in many Southeast Asian countries where Theravada Buddhism is practised. Buddhist Pali scriptures use the term bhikku for mendicant.

By definition: mendicant is an adjective which means habitually engaged in begging, of a religious order originally dependent on alms,or begging for and living on money given by strangers.

It is also a noun which means a beggar especially somebody who begs in the street, friar who lives by begging: a member of a religious order such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, or Augustinians that forbids the ownership of property and encourages working or begging for a living
or a member of a mendicant order.

The word originated from Latin mendicus meaning ‘beggar’, mendicant-, present participle of mendicare meaning "beg", and mendum "a defect".♥

Answer 2

1. begging; practicing begging; living on alms.
2. pertaining to or characteristic of a beggar.
–noun 3. a person who lives by begging; beggar.
4. a member of any of several orders of friars that originally forbade ownership of property, subsisting mostly on alms

Answer 3

Basically, a beggar; however, it may also describe a member of a religious order who works in the outside world and yet is bound to not have any material wealth (i.e. property).