luxury

The Latin root is luxus, meaning excess, profusion, or extravagance, with a probable Proto-Indo-European ancestor linked to bending or deviation from a straight path. Roman writers used luxuria, the noun form, primarily as a moral charge. Cicero in 70 BC accused Verres of luxuria before accusing him of theft. Sallust, writing his histories in the 40s BC, blamed luxuria for the decline of Roman virtue as directly as he blamed military defeat.

Old French took up the word as luxurie and carried its moral weight intact. Dante places the lustful in the second circle of the Inferno under the name lussuria, a word his 13th-century readers understood as sexual excess, not expensive taste. English borrowed luxurie in the 14th century in the same moral sense. Chaucer uses it to mean lechery in the Parson's Tale, listing it among the deadly sins without any material inflection.

The shift toward material meaning in English was slow and contested. Philip Sidney still uses luxury to mean lust in 1590. But by 1630, luxury appears in trade and household accounts meaning costly goods and pleasures, and the moral sense begins to recede. Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees in 1714 set the terms of the modern debate: he argued that private luxury spending, however sinful, drove the public economy. Adam Smith weighed the same question in 1776.

By 1800 the moral meaning was effectively dead in commercial English, and luxury had become a market category. The 20th century turned the noun into a modifier, producing luxury goods, luxury hotels, and luxury brands. The word had traveled from Cicero's courtroom to the duty-free shop, losing its sting at every stop.