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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

greedy.

Having greed; consumed by selfish desires.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ˈɡɹiːdi/
  1. Having greed; consumed by selfish desires.

  2. Prone to overeat.

  3. Tending to match as much text as possible.

    This regular expression performs a greedy match.
  4. That tries to find the global optimum by finding the local optimum at each stage.

  5. Greedily sought or pursued.

    archaic
Where this word comes from

From Middle English gredy, from Anglian Old English grēdiġ (“greedy, hungry, eager”) (cognate West Saxon form grǣdiġ), from Proto-Germanic *grēdagaz (“hungry”), from Proto-Germanic *grēdaz, *grēduz, *grēdô (“hunger”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰer-. Equivalent to greed + -y. Cognate with Old Saxon grādag (“greedy”), Dutch graag (“gladly, willingly”), Old High German grātag (“greedy”), Danish grådig (“greedy”), Norwegian Bokmål grådig (“greedy”) (from Old Norse gráðigr (“greedy”), gráði (“greed, hunger”)), Gothic 𐌲𐍂𐌴𐌳𐌰𐌲𐍃 (grēdags, “hungry”). Sanskrit गृद्धि (gṛddhi, “greed”) is a false cognate.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.