spendthrift / dingthrift

Etymologically, spendthrift is rather unremarkable. It is a simple compound of the verb to spend and the noun thrift, meaning savings. A spendthrift, therefore, is someone who spends their savings, one who wastes money.

The earliest use of the word that I’m aware of is in Stephen Batman’s 1582 translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things). Batman adds the following commentary to Bartholomæus’s section on gold:

Golde maketh wise men glad: and spendthrifts mad.

Preceding spendthrift by a couple decades is dingthrift, that is someone who dings or smashes their savings. Ding has ameliorated over the centuries; now it means a minor blow or strike, while in the past it was more forceful. We see dingthrift in Thomas Drant’s 1566 translation of one of Horace’s satires:

I woulde the not a nipfarthinge,
nor yet a niggarde haue,
Wilte thou therefore, a drunkard be,
a dingthrifte, and a knaue?

And a nipfarthing is a miser (as is a niggard, a word which is etymologically unrelated to the n-word but whose use in present-day discourse should be avoided for obvious reasons). This is the earliest known use of nipfarthing, too.

Sources:

Bartholomæus Anglicus. Batman vppon Bartholme His Booke De proprietatibus rerum. Stephen Batman, trans. London: Thomas East, 1582, 16.4, 254. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Horace. “The Fyrst Satyre.” In A Medicinable Morall, that Is, the Two Bookes of Horace His Satyres. Thomas Drant, trans. London: Thomas Marshe, 1566, sig. A6v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. spendthrift, n. & adj., spend, v.1, thrift, v.1; third edition, March 2021, dingthrift, n., ding, v.1.; September 2003, nipfarthing, n.

Image credit: Jiří Bubeníček, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.