filthy rich
adjective

- extremely rich

(American Heritage Dictionary)

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ORIGIN

English scholar William Tyndale expressed the idea of FILTHY RICH as far back as the 15th century in his popular translation of the Bible. In Titus 1:11, he wrote:

For there are many disobedient and talkers of vanity, and deceivers of minds....whose mouths must be stopped, which pervert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, because of filthy lucre.

The word lucre means money and profit. Although the phrase filthy lucre first appeared in print in Tyndale’s translation, he was undoubtedly not the first person to philosophically link profit and filth, a word that evolved from the Old English fylð meaning "uncleanness, impurity." After all, greed is one of the seven cardinal sins that most Christian religions preach about.

Lucre stems from the Latin lucrum, which in addition to referring to material gain or profit, also meant a desire for riches, greed. Furthermore, in Middle English lucre was defined as illicit gain. While we have a long history of describing riches as being dirty, modern usage of the phrase filthy rich is for the most part neutral and merely a way of explaining that someone has a lot of money.

A similar phrase is "the super rich," a category usually reserved for billionaires, of which there are 2,208 in the world, according to Forbes' 2018 rich list. They are estimated to have a combined net worth of around $9.1 trillion.

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SYNONYMS for rich

affluent, flush, gilded, in clover, in the money, loaded, made of money, moneyed, propertied, prosperous, rolling in it, stinking rich, wealthy, well-heeled, well-off, well-to-do, well provided for, worth a million.

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PRACTICE OWAD TODAY

Say something like:

"The term FILTHY RICH is indicative of a perception that capitalism is an unworthy economic system."