Stingy Meaning
/ˈstɪnd͡ʒi/Definition, CEFR level B2, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
adjUnwilling to spend, give, or share; ungenerous; mean.
adjSmall, scant, meager, insufficient.
Sentence Examples
He may be rich, but he is stingy.
Shylock is greedy, and what is worse, very stingy.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The ____ old billionaire refused to donate any money to local charity.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
He is known for being quite ____, often refusing to leave a tip even when the service is excellent.
Word Origin & History
Uncertain, possibly from stinge, a dialectal variation of sting (verb).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
""Well, I'm doing my best to grow," said Davy, "but it's a thing you can't hurry much. If Marilla wasn't so stingy with her jam I believe I'd grow a lot faster.""
— 1909, Lucy Maud Montgomery, chapter XVIII, in Anne of Avonlea:
"The realization of this joint oppression is like discovering that the stingy crusts of bread being held out by society have mold on them."
— 1985 April 13, Charles Henry Fuller, “Learning to Draw my Name”, in Gay Community News, page 8:
"As the moon wheels around Earth every 28 days and shows us a progressively greater and then stingier slice of its sun-lightened face, the distance between the moon and Earth changes, too. At the nearest point along its egg-shaped orbit, its perigee, the moon may be 26,000 miles closer to us than it is at its far point."
— 2014 September 7, Natalie Angier, “The Moon comes around again [print version: Revisiting a moon that still has secrets to reveal: Supermoon revives interest in its violent origins and hidden face, International New York Times, 10 September 2014, p. 8]”, in The New York Times:
"Bumble bee – Bumble bee / I send to you this sonnet, / But please don't be – Bumble bee / The stingy bee in my bonnet."
— 2015, Kelvin Smith, Four Little Soldiers, page 33:
Explore More B2 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The ____ old billionaire refused to donate any money to local charity.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
He is known for being quite ____, often refusing to leave a tip even when the service is excellent.