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avarice

/ˈævəɹɪs/
nounC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,601 of 15,258neutral

Avarice is extreme greed for wealth. Driven by avarice, the avarice of the age, sheer avarice.

It is one of the seven deadly sins and the only one that gets easier to satisfy with practice. Avarice is about keeping as much as about getting, which is what separates it from ambition.

Evelyn De Morgan · Public domain

Definitions of avarice

  1. 1nounavariceExtreme greed for wealth.C2

    “The whole case was a study in avarice and bad accounting.”

avarice is a greed.

Where it comes from

Latin avaritia comes from avarus, greedy, from avere, to crave.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *h₂ew-

  2. Old French

    avarice

  3. Middle English

    avarice

  4. English, today

    avarice

Built from

  • avārus · Latin — greedy

From Middle English avarice, from Old French avarice. From Middle English avarice, from Old French -, from Latin avāritia, from avārus (“greedy”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

avarice in the wild

  • In the Divine Comedy, Dante meets Adrian V in the fifth terrace of Purgatorio where Adrian V cleanses for the vice of avarice.

    Pope Adrian V

  • The Queen of Spades is an 1834 novella with supernatural elements by Alexander Pushkin, about human avarice.

    The Queen of Spades (story)

  • Intended to represent both avarice and the passing nature of youthful beauty, the woman is shown in half-length, painted in thick impasto.

    Avarice (Dürer, Vienna)

  • The Christian condemnation relates to avarice and greed rather than money itself.

    Love of money

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.