vested interest
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.44 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
14
Letters
4
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An indefeasible right or title, distinguished from a contingent interest, which could be defeated (i.e. cease) if a certain event occurred.
noun
A fixed right granted to an employee, especially under a pension plan.
noun
A stake, often financial, in a particular outcome.
noun
A group of people or organizations with such a stake, especially those that seek to control an existing system or activity from which they derive benefit.
noun
An exceptionally strong interest in protecting or promoting something to one's own advantage.
Example Sentences
- "I saw them enjoying a special privilege which had been theirs so long that it had become a vested interest: they seemed to think it was a law ordained of nature that they should be forever life's favorite sons."
- "Today, under compulsion of patriotic devotion, fear, shame and bitter need, and under the unprecedentedly shrewd surveillance of public officers bent on maximum production, the great essential industries controlled by the vested interests may, one with another, be considered to approach—perhaps even conceivably to exceed—a fifty-percent efficiency; […]"
- "But it was not a question of evidence, of guilt or innocence. Tom Mooney was bitterly hated by the vested interests of San Francisco. He had to be gotten out of the way."
- "On this point there was no difference between mercantilists and feudalists, between crowned planners and vested interests, between centralizing bureaucrats and conservative particularists."
- "It should now be obvious to everyone that vested interests only change when they are forced to do so."
- "She listed “Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the militant unions, the vested interests, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction Rebellion and some of the people we had in the hall earlier” as those who she thought were working against the interests of growth."
Etymology
Popularized in sociology by Thorstein Veblen, The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919). But used earlier, e.g. by Winston Churchill: * 1899, Winston Churchill, The River War, an Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan, page 15: The name of the General was a sufficient guarantee that the slave trade was being earnestly attacked. The Khedive would gladly have stopped at the guarantee, and satisfied the world without disturbing 'vested interests.' But...