ten-thousandaire
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See also: tenthousandaire
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From ten thousand + -aire.
Noun
[edit]ten-thousandaire (plural ten-thousandaires)
- A person whose net worth is at or greater than ten thousand units of the local currency.
- 1920, Sinclair Lewis, chapter V, in Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, →OCLC, section V, pages 65–66:
- I have only one good quality—overwhelming belief in the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our town. It’s so strong that sometimes I do have a tiny effect on the haughty ten-thousandaires. I shake ’em up and make ’em believe in ideals—yes, in themselves.
- 1921 July, Arthur Jerome Eddy, “Introduction”, in Property, Chicago, Ill.: A[lexander] C[aldwell] McClurg & Co., →OCLC, page 12:
- The “swollen fortune” is a fact in our economic development. There may be but one billionaire but there are any number of millionares, thousands of hundred-thousandaires and hundreds of thousands ten-thousandaires. From the point of view of the man who has nothing, an American farmer with ten thousand has a “swollen fortune,” and it is swollen far beyond the farmer’s pro rata share of the country’s wealth. The “swollen fortune” is not a thing of absolute magnitude, but entirely a matter of comparative size.
- 1924 April 12, Albert W[illiam] Atwood, “What Is Taxation For?”, in George Horace Lorimer, editor, The Saturday Evening Post, volume 196, number 41, Philadelphia, Pa.: The Curtis Publishing Company, →ISSN, section “Useful Rich Men”, page 170, column 3:
- Seriously speaking, it is a very real question whether social discontent can be allayed by heavy taxes on large fortunes and incomes. Millionaires are a fact, and far from a wholly pleasing one; but how about the hundred-thousandaires and the hundreds of thousands of ten-thousandaires? To the migratory laborer with fifty dollars, or the wobbly with no dollars, there is just as much injustice in a skilled workman having two thousand dollars invested in a house or a savings bank as there is in a manufacturer having one million.
- 1993, Theodore Huters, “Lives in Profile: On the Authorial Voice in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature”, in Ellen Widmer, W:David Der-wei Wang, editors, From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China (Harvard Contemporary China Series; 9), Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, →ISBN, section III (Narrative Voice and Cinematic Vision), pages 293–294:
- After this interjection, however, the stage is turned back over to the young woman, and she ends her story a few lines later on a utopian note: “We’ve been ten-thousandaires for three years running now, so going to Shenzhen is nothing; it wouldn’t even be a big deal for us to go to America . . . Passport or no passport, we’re poor and lower middle peasants; we’ve got thousands and thousands of dollars and we can go any old place we please” (89/137).