Are you wondering what the best Italian word is to describe that Scrooge in your life, the one who wouldn’t part with a penny if his or her life depended on it? Well, you’re in luck! 😉
The word for stingy in Italian is tirchio. According to Treccani, it likely comes from the old dialectal word pirchio, and may also be related to the verb tirare (to pull, to throw).
Because it is an adjective, the ending changes depending on whether you are talking about a man or a woman, or one person versus many people.
- tirchio = masculine, singular
- tirchia = feminine, singular
- tirchi = masculine, plural
- tirchie = feminine, plural
Dario è molto tirchio, non sgancia mai una lira.
Dario is very stingy, he never coughs up a penny.
Trivia: lira is the name of the former Italian currency, which was replaced by the Euro in 2002.
Stingy is one of those words in English with a surprising number of synonyms, and I believe the same can be said for its Italian equivalent. Just as we can say penny-pinching, miserly, close-fisted, tight-fisted, skinflint and parsimonious, Italians can pick from the following wealth of options: avaro, stitico, taccagno, pezzente (more derogatory), gretto and spilorcio.
You may sometimes hear tirchio paired with the suffixes -one (meaning ‘big’) and -accio (pejorative).
Non voglio spendere cinquanta centesimi per entrare. – Sei un bel tirchione, lo sai?
I don’t want to spend fifty cents to go in. – You’re a real miser, you know that right?
Heather Broster is a graduate with honours in linguistics from the University of Western Ontario. She is an aspiring polyglot, proficient in English and Italian, as well as Japanese, Welsh, and French to varying degrees of fluency. Originally from Toronto, Heather has resided in various countries, notably Italy for a period of six years. Her primary focus lies in the fields of language acquisition, education, and bilingual instruction.
