A miserly, selfish person, comparable to the fictional character Ebenezer Scrooge of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
disapproval If you call someone a Scrooge, you disapprove of them because they are very mean and hate spending money. What a bunch of Scrooges. someone who hates spending money (Ebenezer Scrooge, character in A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens)
It is an anomaly of our times that an Uncle Sam spending at a rate of some $128 billion yearly should become an Uncle Scrooge in the treatment of government workers!.
[ 'skrüj ] (noun.) 1899. The use of the word came from the name of the character, Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens book: “A Christmas Carol”, and was thus used to describe someone who acted like the character in the book.