sycophant

noun

1. One who uses obsequious compliments to gain self-serving favour or advantage from another; a servile flatterer.

   “A sycophant will everything admire: / Each verse, each sentence, sets his soul on fire”

   “VVhile a mean Crovvd of Sycophants attend, / And favvn and flatter, creep and cringe and bend; / The Fav'rite bleſſes his ſuperior State, / Riſes o'er all, and hails Himſelf the Great.”

   “The latest act in the Madness of King Donald drama playing globally on every channel underlined the increasingly delusional world the anti-hero inhabits, his fantasies fed and indulged by a cast of sycophants, lackeys and straight grifters, all in it for what they can get.”

2. One who seeks to gain through the powerful and influential.
3. (obsolete)An informer; a talebearer.

   “[H]is mind had no eye to espy goodness; and therefore accusing sycophants, of all men, did best sort to his nature.”

verb

1. (obsolete, transitive)To inform against; hence, to calumniate.

   “As therefore he began in the title, so in the next leaf he makes it his first business to tamper with his reader by sycophanting and misnaming the work of his adversary.”

2. (rare, transitive)To play the sycophant toward; to flatter obsequiously.