stingy
/ˈstɪn(d)ʒi
/adjective (stingier, stingiest) informal
Mean; ungenerous: his boss is stingy and idle...
- Plus, I don't understand how he can be so generous with his girlfriends (I recently found out he has more than one) and then be so stingy with his own children.
- The budget chief for west Wiltshire has been barred from a town pub for being too stingy with his cash.
- He gives the dullest parties in town and is stingy with the drinks.
Synonyms
mean, miserly, parsimonious, niggardly, close-fisted, penny-pinching, cheese-paring, penurious, Scrooge-like, ungenerous, illiberal, close
informal mingy, tight, tight-fisted
North American informal cheap
vulgar slang tight-arsed
archaic near
Derivatives
stingily
- Public schools are bad, wages are low, strikes and illegal land seizures are increasing, unemployment and crime are high, jails are horribly overcrowded, and electrical power (think air conditioning) is stingily rationed.
- A thick Sicilian-style crust is drizzled stingily with tomato sauce and lightly sprinkled with cheese - it may very well represent the legal minimum that one can put on bread and still advertise it as pizza.
- The young student explains to his friend how stingily the old woman conducts her business, how she beats her sister, and how the old woman decides to leave all her money to a monastery.
stinginess
/ noun ...- But in other areas, she would seem to be thrifty to the point of stinginess.
- If ever an event deserved to be supported this one does, and my hope is that Queally's pub will be packed to the rafters in a show of appreciation of the parents who simply refused to be beaten by the stinginess of the Department of Education.
- Thus he contemplates both Shakespeare's stinginess and his peculiar kind of generosity, an imaginative one that transformed a dying wastrel into the immortal Falstaff.
Origin
Mid 17th century: perhaps a dialect variant of the noun sting + -y1.