Word.ws English Dictionary

root of all evil

root of all evil noun: something that is perceived to be a root cause of all the world's evil.

Noun

root of all evil (plural roots of all evil)

  1. Something that is perceived to be a root cause of all the world's evil.
    • idleness is the root of all evil, lust is the root of all evil
    • The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.1974, Donald Knuth, “Turing Award Lecture”, in Communications of the ACM, page 671

Forms of root of all evil

pluralroots of all evil

Origin of root of all evil

Genericized in other phrases from (the love of) money is the root of all evil, which see.

Questions about root of all evil

What does root of all evil mean?
Root of all evil means something that is perceived to be a root cause of all the world's evil.
What part of speech is root of all evil?
Root of all evil is a noun.
What is the plural of root of all evil?
The plural of root of all evil is roots of all evil.

Words near root of all evil in the dictionary

  1. root morphemes
  2. root nodule
  3. root nodules
  4. root noun
  5. root nouns
  6. root of all evil
  7. root of scarcity
  8. root of unity
  9. root out
  10. root parsley
  11. root parsleys

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: root of all evil (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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