adjective

• Relating to the practice of usury.

  ‘they lend money at usurious rates’

  More example sentences

  • ‘On the other side of the political spectrum, liberals worry that litigation finance firms offering usurious rates prey upon a desperate clientele.’
  • ‘Desperate American workers are forced to rely on credit card debt at usurious interest rates to pay for basic necessities.’
  • ‘They make half their income by surprising people with enormous penalties and usurious interest rate changes if they forget to pay their phone bill one month.’
  • ‘With the closure of rural banks, many farmers have been driven to borrowing from private moneylenders with usurious interest rates of 5 percent per month.’
  • ‘In most developing countries, the informal money-lending system coupled with usurious rates of interest, sometimes as high as 200%, gives birth to a phenomenon called debt bondage.’
  • ‘Planters often charged usurious interest rates on credit extended to their laborers, arguing that these were necessary because of the high risks involved.’
  • ‘She would need to take out a loan to pay him, and the bank meant to exact some usurious rate of interest.’
  • ‘Future revenues were mortgaged against advances at usurious rates.’
  • ‘Service contracts have usurious rates for out-of-contract minutes.’
  • ‘The Ohio Supreme Court thus correctly held on appeal that the contracts were not usurious loans.’
  • ‘Compound interest is no longer commonly thought to be usurious or to involve prohibitively complex calculations.’
  • ‘The drugs industry is being criticised for usurious prices of drugs, medicines and services.’
  • ‘Can you lend to the poor without charging usurious interest?’
  • ‘The Malaysian financier, Benedict said, demanded 29 percent interest, a usurious amount indeed.’
  • ‘Another reason frequently given for promoting cooperatives is that they would protect craftspeople from predatory middlemen and usurious moneylenders.’
  • ‘The financial deregulation he champions has led directly to the predatory, usurious lending practices that afflict the working poor.’
  • ‘Around twenty five percent of Australians cannot access financial services except on the most exploitative and usurious terms.’
  • ‘The aim of the agreement, he told the assembled representatives of 45 nations, was to ‘drive the usurious moneylenders from the temple of international finance.’’
  • ‘Thanks to usurious practices that are legal and common among hospital collection departments, complete financial ruin can easily befall those unable to pay their hospital bills.’
  • ‘They could tolerate anything except someone who tampered with their usurious money-making.’

  Synonyms

  avaricious, acquisitive, greedy, rapacious, grabbing, usurious, covetous, venal