skinflint · noun — one who is excessively stingy or cautious with money; a tightwad; a miser. It carries an Arena rating of 1766, earned across 88 head-to-head judged battles.
Definition from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, skinflint ranks #87 of 17,197 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #319 of 17,180 for Most Ingenious Words, #489 of 17,188 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #950 of 17,201 for Funniest Words.
skinflint is pronounced /ˈskɪnflɪnt/.
Why “skinflint” is a great word
SKINFLINT — [Noun] A person who is excessively stingy or miserly with money. From the phrase 'skin a flint', meaning to go to extreme lengths for the sake of economy, alluding to the impossibility of skinning the hard stone flint without shattering it; first attested c. 1700 in slang dictionaries. Unlike a spendthrift, who scatters wealth with heedless abandon, or the thrifty, who spends with wise economy, a skinflint hoards with a corrosive, grinding avarice. It is the hand that douses a candle at high noon, weighs the shavings from a pencil, and would, if it could, try to peel a stone for one more sliver of value—a life so constricted by saving it has forgotten what it was saving for.
❧ Essay by Lexicurio’s AI · definition, etymology & citations from published sources
Etymology
From the phrase skin a flint (“go to extreme lengths for the sake of gain or economy”), from the brittleness and hardness of flint which makes it almost impossible to remove just its skin without shattering it.
noun
- One who is excessively stingy or cautious with money; a tightwad; a miser.e.g.“You know, he is quite a different sort from the Public Prosecutor and our other provincial skinflints--fellows who shiver in their shoes before they will spend a single kopeck.” — 1842, Gogol, Dead Souls, chapter 4
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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