Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun One who lives very meagerly in order to hoard money.
- noun A greedy or avaricious person.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun If. A miserable person; one who is wretched or unhappy.
- noun An extremely avaricious person; one who hoards money; a niggard; one who in wealth conducts himself as one afflicted with poverty.
- Characteristic of a miser.
- To gather or keep like a miser; keep with jealous care; hoard: with up.
- noun An iron cylinder with an opening in the side and a cutting lip, attached to the lower end of a boring-rod, used in the process of sinking wells in water-bearing strata.
- To collect in the interior of the boring-tool called a miser: used with up.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun obsolete A wretched person; a person afflicted by any great misfortune.
- noun obsolete A despicable person; a wretch.
- noun A covetous, grasping, mean person; esp., one having wealth, who lives miserably for the sake of saving and increasing his hoard.
- noun A stingy person; one very reluctant to spend money.
- noun A kind of large earth auger.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun pejorative A person who
hoards money rather thanspending it; one who is cheap or extremelyparsimonious .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a stingy hoarder of money and possessions (often living miserably)
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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He told her of the fairy mill, of the old man's gloating pride in the word miser, of All Souls 'Eve and Adam Craig's hints about the apple tree and the lilac bush.
Kenny Leona Dalrymple
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Adam shamelessly accepted the word miser with a gloating chuckle.
Kenny Leona Dalrymple
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Insofar as the pursuit of this homogeneous substance provides the binding "one law" of his existence, he resembles the Urizenic Bromion; but to the extent that his fetishistic hoarding of gold necessitates a renunciation of all self-expenditure and a paranoid withdrawal from society (which must be seen as a source of expense or potential thievery), he resembles the withdrawn and virtue-hoarding Theotormon (who, like the miser, is also associated with a "threshold" of stone [2: 6]).
Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake's _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_ 2001
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It's one of the reasons that Henry VII was known as a miser, such was the state of the Treasury when he came to the throne in 1485.
Archive 2009-03-01 2009
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It's one of the reasons that Henry VII was known as a miser, such was the state of the Treasury when he came to the throne in 1485.
A post on why I don't trust people in power to make sensible economic decisions 2009
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But a miser is the mirror image of a miner—what the miner digs up, the miser at least figuratively, and sometimes literally buries right back in the ground.
More Sex Is Safer Sex Steven E. Landsburg 2007
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The life of a miser is the constant exercise of human power put to the service of self.
Eug�nie Grandet 2007
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But a miser is the mirror image of a miner—what the miner digs up, the miser at least figuratively, and sometimes literally buries right back in the ground.
More Sex Is Safer Sex Steven E. Landsburg 2007
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The philanthropist donates for fear of being labelled a miser just as the miser hoards for fear of donating.
spectre12 Diary Entry spectre12 2005
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And she was -- she was a genuine miser, which is a very rare psychological phenomenon.
Prolagus commented on the word miser
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
(Karl Marx)
August 9, 2008