rich

English Online Dictionary. What means rich‎? What does rich mean?

English

Etymology

From Middle English riche (“strong, powerful, rich”), from Old English rīċe (“powerful, mighty, great, high-ranking, rich, wealthy, strong, potent”), from Proto-West Germanic *rīkī (“powerful, rich”), from Proto-Germanic *rīkijaz (“kingly, powerful, rich”), from Proto-Germanic *rīks (“king, ruler”), an early borrowing from Proto-Celtic *rīxs, from Proto-Indo-European *h₃rḗǵs. Reinforced by Old French riche, from the same West Germanic source.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɹɪt͡ʃ/
• Rhymes: -ɪtʃ
• Hyphenation: rich

Adjective

rich (comparative richer or more rich, superlative richest or most rich)

1. Wealthy: having a lot of money and possessions.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:wealthy

   Antonyms: poor; see also Thesaurus:impoverished
2. Having an intense fatty or sugary flavour.
   • 1709-1710, Thomas Baker, Reflections on Learning

     High sauces and rich spices are fetch'd from the Indies.

3. Remunerative.
5. Plentiful, abounding, abundant, fulfilling.

   Antonyms: low, scarce
6. Yielding large returns; productive or fertile; fruitful.

7. Composed of valuable or costly materials or ingredients; procured at great outlay; highly valued; precious; sumptuous; costly.
8. Not faint or delicate; vivid.

9. (informal) Very amusing.

10. (informal) Ridiculous, absurd, outrageous, preposterous, especially in a galling, hypocritical, or brazen way.
    • 1858, William Brown (of Montreal), The Commercial Crisis: Its Cause and Cure (page 28)

      Now, if money be a marketable commodity like flour, as the Witness states, is it not rather a rich idea that of selling the use of a barrel of flour instead of the barrel of flour itself?
11. (computing) Elaborate, having complex formatting, multimedia, or depth of interaction.

    Antonyms: plain, unformatted, vanilla
12. Of a solute-solvent solution: not weak (not diluted); of strong concentration.
    1. Of a fuel-air mixture: having more fuel (thus less air) than is necessary to burn all of the fuel; less air- or oxygen- rich than necessary for a stoichiometric reaction.

       Antonym: lean

13. (finance) Trading at a price level which is high relative to historical trends, a similar asset, or (for derivatives) a theoretical value.

    Antonym: cheap

Derived terms

Related terms

Translations

Noun

rich pl (plural only)

1. The rich people of a society or the world collectively, the rich class of a society.
   • 1926 Jan., F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Rich Boy", The Red Book Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 3, p. 28:

     Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are...

   • 1936 Aug., Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", Esquire:

     ...if he lived he would never write about her, he knew that now. Nor about any of them. The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

   • 1936 Aug. 15, Maxwell Perkins, letter to Elizabeth Lemmon:

     ...Hem is headed for Wyoming,—& wasn't that reference to Scott, in his splendid story otherwise, contemptable, & more so because he said "I am getting to know the rich" & Molly Colum said—we were at lunch together—"the only difference between the rich & other people is that the rich have more money."

   • 2010 Jan. 27, Matt Taibbi, "Populism: Just Like Racism!", True/Slant:

     This is the same Randian bullshit that we've been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting—this idea that the way society works is that the productive "rich" feed the needy "poor," and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for "excesses" might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve. That's basically Brooks's entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of "excesses"—but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

Usage notes

• The adjective rich forms two separate plural nouns: the rich are the people characterized by being rich, while riches are the things that make or might make someone rich. The existence of this separate sense of riches generally precludes informal countable use of rich similar to that seen in poors and wealthies.

Derived terms

Verb

rich (third-person singular simple present riches, present participle riching, simple past and past participle riched)

1. (obsolete, transitive) To enrich.
2. (obsolete, intransitive) To become rich.

References

• “rich”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “rich”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.

Anagrams

• chir-

Central Franconian

Alternative forms

• riech (parts of western Ripuarian)
• reich (Moselle Franconian)

Etymology

From Middle High German rīche, from Proto-Germanic *rīkijaz.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ʀiɕ/

Adjective

rich (masculine riche, feminine and plural riche or rich, comparative richer, superlative et richste)

1. (most of Ripuarian) rich, wealthy

Inflection

Middle English

Adjective

rich

1. alternative form of riche (“rich”)

Middle High German

Etymology 1

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): (before 13^th CE) /ˈrɪx/

Verb

rich

1. second-person singular present imperative of rëchen

Etymology 2

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): (before 13^th CE) /ˈrɪx/

Verb

rich

1. second-person singular present imperative of rëchen