selvish
selvish is the obsolete form of selfish.
Meaning of selfish
Adjective
selfish (comparative more selfish or (proscribed) selfisher, superlative most selfish or (proscribed) selfishest)
- Holding one's own self-interest as the standard for decision making.
- “We all have both a selfish separate self, and an Inner Being that is One with the Universal Spirit. In this sense, every human has a sort of ‘split personality’. We are all kind of what you call ‘schitzy’ with these two sides, these two people living within us. And they are in total opposition....1997, John Peniel, chapter 10, in The Children Of The Law Of One & The Lost Teachings Of Atlantis, page 127
- Having excessive or exclusive regard and concern for one's own well-being, profit or pleasure, with little or no consideration for others.
- Take warning by my fate, and shun that flowery and bewitching path; for in its labyrinths the good, the gentle, the kind-hearted, and the benevolent, are too often lost; while the sordid and the selfish scarcely so much as run a hazard.1823, James Hogg, “Peril First. Love. Circle Third.”, in The Three Perils of Woman; or, Love, Leasing, and Jealousy. […], volume I, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, […], →OCLC...
- Synonyms:
- egoistic, egotistic, egotistical, self-centered, greedy
- Of video game characters: relying on their own actions and capabilities to be effective in the game, rather than on other characters.
- With that said, there is a perk to Xiao being a selfish DPS. He plays like Razor where he needs to be out in the field more than 90 percent of the time. Compared to Diluc, Xiao is more independent when it comes to dealing damage.2021 February 23, Sid Natividad, “Genshin Impact: 5 Ways Xiao Is The Best DPS (And 5 Ways It's Still Diluc)”, in TheGamer, archived from the original on 25 Jan 2024
- Related to or equivalent to a selfish gene; best understood as existing to preserve and replicate itself in competition with other entities at the same level of existence, rather than at the level of the individual or population containing it.
- Discoveries of selfish genetic elements often follow from the emergence of a selfish phenotype either in a cross between members of closely related species, or in crosses involving individuals from different isolated populations within a species.2005, N.S. Sharma, Molecular Structure Of Genes And Chromosomes, Mittal Publications, →ISBN, page 215
Forms of selvish
| comparative | more selvish |
|---|---|
| superlative | most selvish |
Questions about selvish
- What is selvish the obsolete form of?
- Selvish is the obsolete form of selfish.
Words near selvish in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: selvish (page history and authors); selfish (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “selvish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/selvish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
