materialistic
Americanadjective
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excessively concerned with physical comforts or the acquisition of wealth and material possessions, rather than with spiritual, intellectual, or cultural values.
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adhering to the philosophy of materialism, a theory that regards matter as constituting the universe and all its phenomena.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Etymology
Origin of materialistic
Explanation
Who doesn’t love the nice things that money can buy? But if all you care about is the stuff you have and the stuff you want to buy, you are materialistic. Anyone who is obsessively focused on money, or cares deeply about owning luxury goods can be described as materialistic. Material is a synonym for matter: anything that exists. Originally, materialism was a philosophy that "only matter exists." But in 1851, American fiction writer Nathaniel Hawthorne tweaked the definition to mean “a way of life based entirely on consumer goods," a meaning that endures.
Vocabulary lists containing materialistic
Material World: Shopping Lingo
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Tuesdays with Morrie
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100 SAT Words Beginning with "M"
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Materialistic natural science had eclipsed the “spiritual sciences,” giving rise to the “arrogant delusion“ that humankind can achieve the “mastery of nature.”
From Scientific American • Feb. 13, 2015
Materialistic Greeks believed that the laws of nature were the final reality to which man must adjust himself.
From Time Magazine Archive
Their country, wrote the photographer Paul Strand in 1922, was the "supreme altar of the new God," a trinity formed by "God the Machine, Materialistic Empiricism the Son, and Science the Holy Ghost."
From Time Magazine Archive
Materialistic despotisms, with their iron discipline, their mechanistic performance, their hard and shiny exterior, always seem formidable.
From Time Magazine Archive
Materialistic science makes it infinitely richer in terms, with its molecules, and ether, and electrons, and what not.
From A Pluralistic Universe Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy by James, William
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
