SELFISH

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does selfish mean? 

• SELFISH (adjective)
  The adjective SELFISH has 1 sense:

1. concerned chiefly or only with yourself and your advantage to the exclusion of others

  Familiarity information: SELFISH used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• SELFISH (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Concerned chiefly or only with yourself and your advantage to the exclusion of others

Context example:

Selfish men were...trying to make capital for themselves out of the sacred cause of civil rights

Similar:

egotistic; egotistical; narcissistic; self-loving (characteristic of those having an inflated idea of their own importance)

self-seeking; self-serving (interested only in yourself)

Also:

egocentric; egoistic; egoistical; self-centered; self-centred (limited to or caring only about yourself and your own needs)

inconsiderate (lacking regard for the rights or feelings of others)

stingy; ungenerous (unwilling to spend (money, time, resources, etc.))

Antonym:

unselfish (disregarding your own advantages and welfare over those of others)

Derivation:

selfishness (stinginess resulting from a concern for your own welfare and a disregard of others)

 Context examples 

Men are very selfish, even the best of them.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Selfish and ungrateful! to have appeared so to him!

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

But it was not a merely selfish caution, under which she acted, in putting an end to it.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

“Well, well, I must not be selfish,” said he, with a smile, as he pushed back his chair from the breakfast-table.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The world may laugh—may call me absurd, selfish—but it does not signify.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He is the most fearful of giving pain, of wounding expectation, and the most incapable of being selfish, of any body I ever saw.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

Was it a selfish error that was leading me away?

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

And could we carry our selfish point with you, we should leave it without a single regret.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

No; I am not so selfish.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

“And you are also,” I continued, “a man one could not trust in the least thing where it was possible for a selfish interest to intervene?”

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)