wealthy

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wealthy

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From Middle English welthy, welþi, equivalent to wealth +‎ -y. Cognate with Middle Dutch weldech, weeldech (“magnificent, luscious, lavish”).

• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈwɛl.θi/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛlθi

wealthy (comparative wealthier or more wealthy, superlative wealthiest or most wealthy)

1. Possessing financial wealth; rich.
   • 1963, Colin Clark, Australian Hopes and Fears‎, page 75:

     As a result of these causes the grazier marks himself off fairly sharply from the rest of Australia. He has always spent a considerable proportion of the time in the capital cities, in each of which he has formed a club to which, besides the graziers, only a few of the wealthiest and most prominent of the city dwellers are admitted.

   • 1984, Cornelia Butler Flora, Animals in the Farming System:

     As people stall feed through the years, or if they are wealthier to begin with, the money is used to build houses and buy metal roof sheets, or to buy bicycles, ox-carts and breeding cows.

   • 2010, Robert Michael Pyle, chapter 18, in Mariposa Road‎, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, page 158:

     Gleefully and legally intruding upon the sanctum of the wealthy linksters, we walked the mitigation meadows.

   • 2013 May 17, George Monbiot, “Money just makes the rich suffer”, in The Guardian Weekly‎, volume 188, number 23, page 19:

     In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. […]  The public realm is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra–wealthy and the companies they control are abandoned, and Edwardian levels of inequality are almost fetishised.

2. Abundant in quality or quantity; profuse. (Can we add an example for this sense?)

• See Thesaurus:wealthy

• See Thesaurus:impoverished

• independently wealthy

• upscale

wealthy (countable and uncountable, plural wealthies)

1. (plural only) Synonym of rich: the wealthy people of a society or of the world collectively.
   • 2009 Oct., Rachel A. Bouvier, "Sulfur Dioxide Emissions and Per Capita Income", Environment & Development Economics, Vol. 14, No. 5:

     ... whether consumption patterns of the wealthy are more or less polluting than those of the poor depends on the contaminant in question.

   The wealthy pay most of the taxes but the uberwealthy hardly pay any at all: they hold stock and property and live off debt borrowed against that collateral.

3. (uncommon, countable) A rich person.
   • 1975 December 6, “A Real Presidential Choice Is Being Ignored”, in Evening Independent:

     it was possible for a group like the Libertarians to hope that a couple of weakminded wealthies might donate the seed money to get a campaign rolling.

   • 1977 April 4, “Public TV Presents miracle Series”, in Argus-Press:

     Bernice is a nice, sardonic tale of envy and young wealthies of the pre-flapper era, when a girl who bobbed her hair was thought loose by the flask-bearing blades who tried to get her tight.

   • 2006 November 16, “Can the Democrats Deliver?”, in Washington Post:

     Ending tax cuts to wealthies would only increase tax revenues by $40 - $60 billion a year - about 20% of current deficit - so it's a waste of time.

   F. Scott Fitzgerald never got over Ginevra King's dad reminding him he wasn't a wealthy and needed to aim lower.

• See Thesaurus:moneybags

• Whatley