adjective

• (of a person or their behaviour) spending money in an extravagant and wasteful way.

  ‘A certain disillusion is perhaps necessary for the practice of conversation: it is the art of the thriftless genius, appropriate to the brilliant failure, the genius manqué, and the inebriate.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Yet, as Smiles observed, ‘No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.’’
  • ‘He's the last revolutionary measuring up the last of the thriftless rich.’
  • ‘Today we tend to dismiss the moralizing of the late Victorians who insisted that the unemployed were lazy, intemperate, or thriftless.’
  • ‘She focuses on the joys of the old orchard where the trees, ‘long past their prime,’ remain with their ‘boughs… untrimmed in thriftless beauty.’’
  • ‘This certainly was ‘a thriftless sort of charity’, to use his own phrase, which did not cause him much sacrifice, although he was generous in absolute terms.’
  • ‘Riches cannot be found in the hands of the thriftless.’

  Synonyms

  extravagant, profligate, spendthrift, unthrifty, improvident, wasteful, free-spending, prodigal, squandering, lavish

  View synonyms