Word definition: rich

Etimology


From Middle English riche (“strong, powerful, rich”), from Old English rīċe (“powerful, mighty, great, high-ranking, rich, wealthy, strong, potent”), from Proto-West Germanic *rīkī (“powerful, rich”), from Proto-Germanic *rīkijaz (“kingly, powerful, rich”), from Proto-Germanic *rīks (“king, ruler”), an early borrowing from Proto-Celtic *rīxs, from Proto-Indo-European *h₃rḗǵs. Reinforced by Old French riche, from the same West Germanic source.

adjective


rich (comparative richer, superlative richest)

Wealthy: having a lot of money and possessions.

Having an intense fatty or sugary flavour.

Remunerative.

Plentiful, abounding, abundant, fulfilling.

Yielding large returns; productive or fertile; fruitful.

Composed of valuable or costly materials or ingredients; procured at great outlay; highly valued; precious; sumptuous; costly.

Not faint or delicate; vivid.

(informal) Very amusing.

(informal) Ridiculous, absurd, outrageous, preposterous, especially in a galling, hypocritical, or brazen way.

(computing) Elaborate, having complex formatting, multimedia, or depth of interaction.

Of a solute-solvent solution: not weak (not diluted); of strong concentration.

(finance) Trading at a price level which is high relative to historical trends, a similar asset, or (for derivatives) a theoretical value.

Examples


“A very welcome, kind, useful present, that means to the parish. By the way, Hopkins, let this go no further. We don't want the tale running round that a rich person has arrived. Churchill, my dear fellow, we have such greedy sharks, and wolves in lamb's clothing. […]”

In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. The welfare state is dismantled. […]

a rich dish; rich cream or soup; rich pastry

It is the richest food I have ever eaten, and for this reason I soon learned to partake of it sparingly.

High sauces and rich spices are fetch'd from the Indies.

All racists I grew up with have rich jobs.

a rich treasury; a rich entertainment; a rich crop

Tho' my Date of mortal Life be short, it shall be glorious; / Each minute shall be rich in some great action.

The gorgeous East with richest hand / Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold.

For countries with rich culinary traditions that date back to the Aztecs and Incas, Mexico and Peru have developed quite a taste for modern food fashions. Mexicans quaff more fizzy drinks than any other country; Peru has the highest density of fast-food joints in the world.

Sham Shui Po might be one of Hong Kong’s poorest neighbourhoods but it has a rich immigrant history and a glut of fantastic street-food joints.

rich soil or land; a rich mine

a rich endowment; a rich dress; rich silk or fur; rich presents

rich and various gems

a rich red colour

The scene was a rich one.

a rich incident or character

Now, if money be a marketable commodity like flour, as the Witness states, is it not rather a rich idea that of selling the use of a barrel of flour instead of the barrel of flour itself?

It is a bit rich to oppress, torture, imprison, enslave, deport and proscribe a people for 200 years, and then take credit for the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.

A skilled multimedia developer will have no problems adding interactive video and audio into existing rich media web pages.

Some rich text email messages contain formatting information that's best viewed with Microsoft Word.

But what did matter was that the new web platform provided a rich experience.

mixed up a batch that was quite rich

Antonym: lean

The ETF is trading rich to NAV right now; we can arb this by selling the ETF and buying the underlying constituents.

Related words


synonyms

(having wealth): See Thesaurus:wealthy

antonyms

(wealthy): See Thesaurus:impoverished

(plentiful): needy

(computing): plain, unformatted, vanilla

(fuel-air mixture): lean

(financial markets): cheap

related terms

nouveau riche

noun


rich pl (plural only)

The rich people of a society or the world collectively, the rich class of a society.

Examples


Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are...

...if he lived he would never write about her, he knew that now. Nor about any of them. The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

...Hem is headed for Wyoming,—& wasn't that reference to Scott, in his splendid story otherwise, contemptable, & more so because he said "I am getting to know the rich" & Molly Colum said—we were at lunch together—"the only difference between the rich & other people is that the rich have more money."

This is the same Randian bullshit that we've been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting—this idea that the way society works is that the productive "rich" feed the needy "poor," and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for "excesses" might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve. That's basically Brooks's entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of "excesses"—but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

When the poor have no more to eat, they will eat the rich.

verb


rich (third-person singular simple present riches, present participle riching, simple past and past participle riched)

(obsolete, transitive) To enrich.

(obsolete, intransitive) To become rich.

Examples


And than he shall be riched ſo, That it may faile nevermo

With shadowy forests and with champains rich'd

Data provided by Wiktionary