selfish
/ˈsɛlfɪʃ/adjective
Concerned chiefly with one’s own interests
From Proto-Indo-European, through Proto-Germanic and Old English self (One’s own person or identity).
Lineage
self
-ish
The story
Long before selfishness became a moral accusation, self was simply a sturdy Germanic way of pointing back to one’s own person. Old English speakers wrote it as self, seolf, or sylf, and used it in compounds such as ic selfa—literally “I self,” or “myself.” The suffix -ish began life as Old English -isc, meaning “of a country or people,” a distant cousin of forms behind German -isch and French -esque; over time it shifted from nationality to character, as in childish or foolish. By the 1630s, English had welded the two pieces together, and the word was reportedly associated with Presbyterian writers, though that coinage story is based on a later claim by Bishop Hacket. Then Richard Dawkins gave the word a spectacular scientific afterlife in 1976 with The Selfish Gene, where “selfish” describes genes’ replicating behavior rather than conscious spite. Remember the visual joke hidden inside it: selfish is literally “self-shaped”—a person so tightly wrapped around the self that nobody else can get a hand in.
Modern usage
Used informally, sometimes humorously, for refusing to share or disregarding others’ feelings
- Heard in
- informal speech · internet slang
- See
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)
Words from the same roots
self · Proto-Indo-European, through Proto-Germanic and Old English, ‘One’s own person or identity’
Derivedself-sufficiency, independence, selfsame, oneself, herself, themselves