Someone generous gives more than they have to: money, time, help, whatever they have got. The uncle who always pays for the meal, the neighbour who spends a Saturday helping you move a sofa, the friend who lends you a car and never asks when it is coming back.
Generous runs with two prepositions, and they do different jobs: you are generous to a person and generous with a thing. She was generous to the staff; he was generous with his time. The word also means simply large — a generous helping of pudding, a generous slice, a generous salary. A generous reading of what somebody said is the kind one, the version that assumes the best. The noun is generosity and the adverb is generously, and the opposite is mean in British English, stingy almost everywhere else.
1adjectivegenerousWilling to give money, time or help freely.~39%
“It was generous of her to pay for everyone.”
synonyms: big-hearted, open-handed, giving
2adjectiveampleLarger than usual in size or amount.~59%
“He cut himself a generous slice of cake.”
synonyms: ample, plentiful, large
3adjectivecharitableKind in the way you judge somebody.~2%
“That is a generous reading of what he actually said.”
synonyms: charitable, forgiving
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Generous first meant well-born. Latin generosus came from genus, race or stock, and described somebody out of a good family; English carried that sense for a long time. The giving grew out of the assumption underneath it, that noble blood behaved nobly. In the end the behaviour kept the word and the bloodline lost it.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵenh₁-
Latin
generōsus — of noble birth
Middle French
genereux
English, today
generous
Built from
From Middle French genereux, and its source, Latin generōsus (“of noble birth”), from genus (“race, stock”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA