What Does "Cupiditas" mean?

Cupiditas is a Latin word that means greed, ambition or desire. It was used in some cases, such as the Bible, to mean greed, but it was also used by the Roman poet Catullus to mean desire. It is the origin of the English word "cupidity," which can mean either greed or, in some cases, sexual desire. However, its original use in Latin is a bit more complicated.

The love of money

The word is often used in the context of the common phrase, "Radix malorum est cupiditas," which in English means, "the root of evil is greed." This saying originated from the New Testament, 1 Timothy 6:10; the phrase appears this way in the Vulgate. When the Bible was translated into English, the King James Version printed the phrase as "the love of money is the root of all evil." The first three words are omitted in a common misquote of the phrase; those who only know the misquote may conclude that the Bible considers money itself the root of all evil.

The love of a woman

The Roman poet Catullus wrote, "Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti in vente et rapida scribere oportet aqua." Roughly translated into English, it reads as follows, "What a woman says to a passionate lover shall find itself written in the wind and the running water." There is no ambiguity here regarding the use of the word.

Cupidity

The OED defines the English word "cupidity" as "ardent desire, inordinate longing or lust; covetousness," which would refer to sexual and not monetary desire. This suggests an ambiguity to the root word that the KJV missed when translating the Bible.

Cupiditas is a word that means desire, but different sources over the years have interpreted it as a different type of desire. The nuances that puzzled translators have had repercussions throughout the history of the world.