wealth
Pluralwealths (some meanings)
- 1A great amount of money, property, and other valuable assets owned by a person or group.
The country's wealth was concentrated among a small number of families.
Much of her wealth came from early investments in technology.
Similarriches, fortune, affluence, prosperity, money
Oppositepoverty, destitution, penury
Note
Economists treat this as a stock rather than a flow. Wealth is what a person, household or nation holds at a given moment, while income is what arrives over a period. A family can earn well and own little, or own much and earn little. Today's money-and-property meaning is a narrowing of the old sense of well-being.
- 2A great amount of something; an abundance or plenty.
The report contained a wealth of detail about local history.
His garden produced a wealth of vegetables that summer.
Similarabundance, profusion, plenty, host, mass
Oppositedearth, lack, scarcity, paucity
Note
Here the word works almost entirely inside one construction: a wealth of followed by a noun, as in a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of data, a wealth of carved wood. Unlike the riches meaning, it takes the indefinite article. It is a countable frame, even when the noun after it is a mass noun like detail or information.
- 3A state of prosperity, well-being, and general happiness.
Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth.
1611, The Holy Bible, King James VersionNote
The oldest meaning, and the one the word began with: Middle English welthe meant "happiness, prosperity." In The Merchant of Venice, a body lent "for his wealth" is lent for a friend's welfare, and the King James Bible of 1611 asks every man to seek "another's wealth," meaning his good. The sense survives in commonwealth. Elsewhere, read it this way only in older texts.
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Origin
Inherited from Middle English welth or welthe ("happiness, prosperity"), from Old English. It may alternatively be an alteration of wele ("wealth, well-being"), reshaped to end in -th by analogy with words like health and dearth. It is related to weal and well, with cognates such as Dutch weelde and German Wohl ("well-being").