Selfishness

How to spell selfishness

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce selfishness

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does selfishness mean?

1. nounThe quality of caring only about one's own interests and ignoring those of others.

Selfishness in a sentence

• His selfishness over the inheritance split the family for years.

• Sharing the last of the supplies showed there was no selfishness in her at all.

Where does selfishness come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built entirely from native English parts. The core is 'self', an Old English word (seolf) that meant one's own person or identity, a word with deep Germanic roots shared across languages like Dutch (zelf) and German (selbst). The adjective 'selfish' was a relatively late coinage, appearing in the 1600s; it is often credited to Presbyterian writers who needed a single word for caring only about oneself, where earlier English would have used a longer phrase. Adding the suffix '-ness', a thoroughly Old English ending used to turn adjectives into nouns of state or quality, produced 'selfishness', the condition of being selfish. The spelling trap lives in the seam: the adjective 'selfish' already ends in '-sh', so writers must remember that the noun simply stacks '-ness' on top, giving the doubled 's' cluster 'shn' that looks odd but is correct.

How the word is built

• self (one's own person)
• -ish (adjective suffix: having the quality of)
• -ness (noun suffix: state or quality)