greedy
Americanadjective
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excessively or inordinately desirous of wealth, profit, etc..
The greedy owners of the company paid their employees too little and charged their customers too much.
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having an excessive desire for food or drink.
That greedy guy ate four of those brownies before anyone else got any!
- Synonyms:
- insatiable, gluttonous, voracious, ravenous
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keenly desirous; eager (often followed by of orfor ).
greedy for praise.
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requiring or using much of a specified thing (often used in combination).
These big trucks are fuel-greedy.
Crops that are greedy for water should not be planted in dry regions.
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Computers.
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of or relating to an algorithm, search, etc., that operates one step at a time instead of checking all possible paths or solutions all at once and then selecting the one with the best overall outcome.
A result may be achieved faster with a greedy search, but that result is not always the correct or best one.
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of or relating to an operator or quantifier in a search query that will return the largest match result possible.
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adjective
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excessively desirous of food or wealth, esp in large amounts; voracious
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eager (for)
a man greedy for success
Usage
What does greedy mean? Greedy means filled with greed—an excessive desire for more, especially for more money and possessions.It can be used to describe people, as in greedy billionaires, or actions that are based on greed, as in It was a greedy scheme to squeeze more money out of people. Greed and greedy are always used negatively to criticize the excessive desire for more.Greed is often thought to influence people to do bad things in their obsession to acquire more money or more stuff. In the expression “the love of money is the root of all evil,” the love of money is another way of saying being greedy.Less commonly, greedy can mean the same thing as gluttonous—having an excessive desire for food.Example: These greedy hedge fund managers have more money than they can spend in a lifetime, yet they insist on trying to get away with paying the least amount of taxes possible.
Related Words
See avaricious, greed.
Other Word Forms
- greedily adverb
- greediness noun
- nongreedy adjective
- overgreedily adverb
- overgreediness noun
- overgreedy adjective
- ungreedy adjective
Etymology
Origin of greedy
First recorded before 900; Middle English gredy, Old English grædig; cognate with Old Norse grāthugr, Gothic gredags
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.
After an overconfident miller fibs that his daughter can spin straw into gold, a greedy king locks the poor girl in a room full of straw.
“Get out of the way, you greedy dragon!” she teased, and broke him off a piece.
From Literature
A greedy pawnbroker gets involved, and the pieces are in place for a fable — a surreal one, without the customary lesson at the end.
From Los Angeles Times
"When profits were high, everyone became greedy," said Le, now 23, adding that "it was too good to be true".
From Barron's
A rich man living in luxury on the continent’s frontier, Magnus is nonetheless greedy.
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.
