Avaricious

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˌævəˈɹɪʃəs/

Definitions

  1. Excessively greedy and grasping for wealth or possessions, displaying an intense and insatiable desire to accumulate money and material goods
  2. Characterized by an overwhelming and uncontrollable craving to amass wealth and material possessions at any cost
  3. Driven by an insatiable hunger for money and valuables that consumes one's character and motivations entirely

Etymology: An avid reader and an avaricious banker are closer relatives than either might like to admit. Both descend from a single Latin verb, "avere," which meant simply to long for, to crave. Whether that longing looked like hunger for books or hunger for gold depended on which branch of the family you followed. From "avere" Latin built two adjectives. "Avidus" described anyone eager, keen or hungry, and it eventually gave English "avid." "Avarus" narrowed the craving to money and possessions: the man who could never have enough. From it came the noun "avaritia," greed. The Romans had a stock comic figure for the type. Plautus's play "Aulularia," about an old man obsessed with a hidden pot of gold, was reworked centuries later by Molière as "L'Avare" (1668), "The Miser." Its French title is "avarus" barely changed. The word's heaviest moral weight came from the Church. When Gregory the Great set out his list of capital sins in the late sixth century, "avaritia" was among them, and for the next thousand years preachers across Latin Christendom warned against it by that name. Avarice was the vice of the moneylender and the hoarder, and it was routinely painted as a sin that fed on itself, since every coin gained only sharpened the appetite for the next. Old French inherited the noun as "avarice" and formed an adjective from it, "avaricieux." English borrowed the noun first, around 1300, and when Chaucer's Parson catalogues the deadly sins near the end of "The Canterbury Tales," Avarice receives a long section of its own. The adjective followed by about 1400, still in Middle English, and the French "-ieux" settled into the familiar English "-ious." The two Latin cousins have kept to their separate paths ever since. "Avid" can be cheerful, even admirable, while avaricious has never shaken its old association with the counting-house and the sermon. It still means wanting more money than anyone could need.

Synonyms: greedy, covetous, grasping, rapacious, insatiable

Antonyms: generous, charitable, unselfish, philanthropic