I read a sentence in a chapter in my history book which was:
A century ago the British arrived in Hindostan and gradually entertained troops in their service and became masters of every state. Source
Now, I'm unable to figure out what "entertained in service" imply here.
This is a very strange use of the word "entertain".
The Cambridge dictionary has this definition:
entertain verb (INVITE) [ I or T ]
to invite someone to your home and give food and drink to them:
We entertain a lot of people, mainly business associates of my wife's.
Now that I live on my own, I don't entertain much.
The Oxford dictionary provides the following in the “fine print”:
Origin Late Middle English: from French entretenir, based on Latin inter ‘among’ + tenere ‘to hold’. The word originally meant ‘maintain, continue’, later ‘maintain in a certain condition, treat in a certain way’, also ‘show hospitality’ (late 15th century).
In your example, the meaning of the word "entertain" is probably a very archaic usage: a direct reference to the origin of the word: “to hold” + “among”.
Using this definition, the following sentence:
A century ago the British arrived in Hindostan and gradually entertained troops in their service and became masters of every state
Would mean:
A century ago the British arrived in [the subcontinent] and gradually brought troops into it and controlled all of its regions.
This is very unusual writing — I assume your example is British and from the early twentieth century, or earlier. American English would never use the word “entertain” this way.
