profit

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun An advantageous gain or return; benefit.
• noun Financial gain from a transaction or from a period of investment or business activity, usually calculated as income in excess of costs or as the final value of an asset in excess of its initial value.
• intransitive verb To make a gain or profit.
• intransitive verb To derive advantage; benefit.
• intransitive verb To be beneficial to.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To benefit; advantage; be of service to; help on; improve; advance.
• To make improvement; improve; grow better; make progress, intellectually or morally: as, to profit by reading or by experience.
• To gain in a material sense; become better off or richer: as, to profit by trade or manufactures.
• To be of use or advantage; bring good.
• noun Advancement; improvement.
• noun Any advantage; accession of good from labor or exertion; the acquisition of anything valuable, corporeal or intellectual, temporal or spiritual.
• noun Specifically, the advantage or gain resulting to the owner of capital from its employment in any undertaking; the excess of the selling price over the original cost of anything; acquisition beyond expenditure; pecuniary gain in any action or occupation; gain; emolument: in commerce commonly used in the plural.
• noun Synonyms Benefit, Utility, etc. (see advantage), service, welfare, behalf, behoof, weal, good.
• noun Revenue, etc. (see income), return, avails.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun Acquisition beyond expenditure; excess of value received for producing, keeping, or selling, over cost; hence, pecuniary gain in any transaction or occupation; emolument.
• noun Accession of good; valuable results; useful consequences; benefit; avail; gain; as, an office of profit
• transitive verb To be of service to; to be good to; to help on; to benefit; to advantage; to avail; to aid.
• intransitive verb To gain advantage; to make improvement; to improve; to gain; to advance.
• intransitive verb To be of use or advantage; to do or bring good.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun Total income or cash flow minus expenditures. The money or other benefit a non-governmental organization or individual receives in exchange for products and services sold at an advertised price.
• noun dated, literary Benefit, positive result obtained.
• noun law In property law, a nonpossessory interest in land whereby a party is entitled to enter the land of another for the purpose of taking the soil or the substance of the soil (coal, oil, minerals, and in some jurisdictions timber and game).
• verb transitive To benefit (somebody), be of use to (somebody).
• verb intransitive To benefit, gain.
• verb intransitive To take advantage of, exploit, use.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• verb make a profit; gain money or materially
• noun the advantageous quality of being beneficial
• verb derive a benefit from
• noun the excess of revenues over outlays in a given period of time (including depreciation and other non-cash expenses)