Mammon
See also: mammon
English
WOTD – 13 September 2016
Alternative forms
Etymology
From Late Latin mammona (“wealth”), from Hellenistic Ancient Greek μαμωνᾶς (mamōnâs), from Aramaic מָמוֹנָא (māmōnā, “money, wealth”). Compare Hebrew מָמוֹן (mamón, “money”).
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈmamən/
Audio (Southern England) (file) - (General American) IPA(key): /ˈmæmən/
- Rhymes: (General American) -æmən
- Hyphenation: Mam‧mon
Proper noun
Mammon
- The desire for wealth personified as an evil spirit or a malign influence.
- 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Matthew 6:24:
- No man can ſerue two maſters: for either he will hate the one and loue the other, or elſe hee will holde to the one, and deſpiſe the other. Ye cannot ſerue God and Mammon.
- 1857 November, “The Present Panic”, in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, volume XXIV, Edinburgh: William Tait, →OCLC, page 644:
- They [bankers] would do what has been done by the Bank of France—buy bullion at a premium, on the approach of danger, and keep peril at a safe and respectable distance. Any expenditure that might be incurred for that purpose would be small indeed when contrasted with the immense loss and suffering caused by the present system, and the continual fear in which the public now live of some new crisis—because it has been out of one and into another for a long period now; and that will be the case hereafter, until we have no interval to gather strength, and recruit for the next struggle with Mammon, or Moloch, or whatever other name of evil import belongs to the "Tutelarity" of Lombard-street and its precincts.
- 1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 306:
- Lives sacrificed upon the altar of Mammon, only units in the thousands who have fallen in the wilds of Australia, victims to the fever and unrest caused by the search for gold.
- Often mammon: wealth, material avarice, profit.
- 2008, Edwin [B.] Mullins, The Popes of Avignon: A Century in Exile, New York, N.Y.: BlueBridge, →ISBN, page 43:
- The proper sphere of the church, after all, was the kingdom of God, not greedy earthbound kingdoms of mammon, which should be left to temporal authorities to rule and squabble over.
- 2009 January 19, Michael McNay, “Andrew Wyeth: Realist painter whose work was much loved by the US public but divided the critics [obituary]”, in The Guardian, London, archived from the original on 16 March 2016:
- But he [Andrew Wyeth] did not want to become an all-American illustrator like the Post's illustrious Norman Rockwell – and he had heard his own father, an illustrator, bemoan choosing the path of mammon rather than the path of virtue, and declined.
German
Pronunciation
Audio (file)
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