arriviste
Americannoun
-
arrivistes
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of arriviste
From French, dating back to 1900–05; see origin at arrive, -ist
Explanation
An arriviste is someone who's moved up in the world quickly and ends up being resented. You might visit your hometown and feel like it's full of arrivistes who can pay exorbitant prices for enormous houses. When someone suddenly earns a whole lot more money than they did before, they find themselves in a new economic class. If the people who have belonged to this group for a long time (maybe they inherited their wealth from their grandparents, for example) are resentful of this person and their "new money," they might use the word arriviste. An arriviste is newly arrived in this world — as you can see in the French root, arriver, "to arrive."
Vocabulary lists containing arriviste
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.
See Examples For:
Four years later, he had enough arriviste chutzpah to run for state governor as the candidate for the Liberty Union Party—a leftist Vermont grouping.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 29, 2026
Her circle includes an aunt who is a champion wrestler, a resident Goth named Isabel and sultry Penny Century, an arriviste married to a wealthy magnate with horns on his head.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 3, 2023
Mr. Epstein may have been wealthy, but he was a Brooklyn-born arriviste seeking legitimacy and mobility among the moneyed upper classes.
From New York Times ● Dec. 17, 2021
Similarly, in Our Mutual Friend there’s lacerating satire of the nouveau-riche Veneerings and their aristocratic and arriviste hangers-on.
From The Guardian ● Jun. 23, 2020
Bobby, in contrast, was nervous and volatile, the chess arriviste of Brooklyn, a colt of a player, and as it was beginning to develop, the spearhead of the coming generation of American players.
From "Endgame" by Frank Brady
Welcome to the second season of HBO’s opulent drama “The Gilded Age,” a series laden with emblematic showdowns between the gaudy arrivistes and the idle drawing-room class.
From New York Times ● Nov. 8, 2023
Yes, they must have seemed like arrivistes when they came out on top after a long period of civil war.
From Washington Post ● Dec. 30, 2022
George and Ruth are the sophisticated, wealthy ones; Clay and Amanda are the middle-class arrivistes.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 2, 2020
Now, many of them are considered household names, even mandarins of a sort—Gabriel García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Julio Cortázar—but first they were gritty arrivistes, young and unknown.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 28, 2015
Masters of power politics, engineers of genius, the Mexica were also upstarts and pretenders, arrivistes who falsely claimed a brilliant line of descent.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
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.
