mingy
adjUK /ˈmɪndʒi/
Etymology Uncertain. Perhaps a blend of mean + stingy.
1
Colloquial Mean, miserly, stingy.
- 'And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel was dead?' 'No! They were a mingy lot.' He laughed suddenly. 'The Colonel used to say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their boot-laces aren't correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That's what finishes me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet they're always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each--'1928, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, chapter XV, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, [Germany?]: Privately printed, →OCLC:
- The dark girl tossed her hat on the bed and hastily produced a packet of cigarettes from her bag, lighting and inhaling one with a deep exhalation of relief, saying, "Thank God for a cigarette! It's the only thing I will thank the mingy old blighter for."1950, Norman Lindsay, Dust or Polish?, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 2:
2 more examples
- After the Liberation Mrs Crewe kept on being as mingy as before with the food; and wouldn't let Harold buy any new clothes.1974, GB Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, New York, published 2007, page 298:
- Now all that, in its mingy way, is logical enough.1985, Peter Carey, Illywhacker, Faber and Faber, published 2003, page 413:
2
Small; inconsequential.
- The great train snaked on through the dark, pounding out the miles through the empty plains and mingy hamlets of Georgia, the 'Peach State', the angry moan of its four-toned wind-horn soughing over the wide savannah and the long shaft of its single searchlight ripping the black calico of the night.1954, Ian Fleming, “Allumeuse”, in Live and Let Die, London: Pan Books, published 1957, page 115:
- Synonyms
- niggardly