what do you call a person who does everything for wealth or only cares about being wealthy [closed]

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I am trying to describe a Shakespeare character. I need a word for a person who does everything for wealth or who only cares about being wealthy. How would I use the word I need in a sentence? This person is (insert the word here)

Psychologically they would probably be a psychopath/sociopath, but those terms do not necessarily imply desire for wealth -- it can be power, fame, etc.

"Kleptocrat" generally refers to a ruler who is in it for the money, but I just noted that The New Yorker uses it in a somewhat broader sense.

5 Answers 5

You seem to be looking for a noun!

How about, moneygrubber?

A definition of moneygrubber is "a person who is aggressively engaged in or preoccupied with making or saving money." (Dictionary.com)

So, in your example sentence. "This person is a moneygrubber."

You could also try Scrooge as an allusion to the Dickens character. As in,

"The guy was a real Scrooge!

Which is a really fun sentence, in my opinion! But, if you are talking about Shakespeare and you bring up Dickens, you may be opening up a whole "nother" can of worms.

There's a real semantic gulf between to grub (root, search for something in the earth, etc.) and to grab (seize suddenly and eagerly; hence, to appropriate to oneself in a rapacious or unscrupulous manner). Comparing BrE and AmE corpuses for the more common hyphenated forms money-grubbing,money-grabbing it seems Brits are moving more to the latter.

Sounds like you're on to something, @fumblefingers! I'm an American, and I've never heard "moneygrabbing" used, although I can certainly grok the meaning of it. "Moneygrubbing" and "moneygrubber" I've heard lots of times.

Yeah, in the US "money grabbing" would not have nearly the pejorative meaning that "moneygrubbing" has.

I originally assumed grubstake would have been predominantly a C19 US term (in my mind it's strongly associated with "Wild West" prospectors, "dirt farmers", etc.). But this NGram suggests to me it was probably more of a regional / dialectal usage that gained wider traction during the "linguistic melting pots" of WW1 and WW2. It's 4-5 times less common in BrE than AmE, presumably because the referents are/were less common in the UK.

Avaricious or one of its synonyms.

Avaricious, covetous, greedy, rapacious share the sense of desiring to possess more of something than one already has or might in normal circumstances be entitled to.
Avaricious often implies a pathological, driven greediness for money or other valuables and usually suggests a concomitant miserliness: the cheerless dwelling of an avaricious usurer.
Covetous implies a powerful and usually illicit desire for the property or possessions of another: The book collector was openly covetous of my rare first edition.
Greedy, the most general of these terms, suggests a naked and uncontrolled desire for almost anything—food and drink, money, emotional gratification: embarrassingly greedy for praise.
Rapacious, stronger and more assertive than the other terms, implies an aggressive, predatory, insatiable, and unprincipled desire for possessions and power: a rapacious frequenter of tax sales and forced auctions.
_{from dictionary.com's "synonym study" under 'avaricious'}