The word “thrift” is a good example of how English meaning shifts over time. “Thrift” comes from the word “thrive” with the addition of the suffix “-t.” Adding the “t” was a way in Germanic languages (such as Old English) to form a noun from a verb. It’s the same addition that produced “gift” from “give,” “flight” from “fly,” “heft” from “heave,” and so on.
“Thrift” is a very old word, and before the 1200s was used to mean prosperity and sometimes luck — which included both good luck and bad luck. A citation from around 1305 uses “thrift” as “good fortune:” “Sorewe him mote bifalle And liþer þrift vpon his heued.” That’s saying, basically, “give him good luck” or “lay good fortune on his head.” But that sense of “thrift” became obsolete by the 1700s.
Gradually, “thrift” came to be used to mean work; your occupation. In 1721, in “Ode to Mr. F___,” Allan Ramsay used it in that way: “Poor Vulcan hard at thrift, Gets mony a sair and heavy lift.” This usage of “thrift” still exists here and there, but only in dialects.
Sort of related to “thrift” as prosperity is a version of the word that meant physical health or well-being. This was health in general, not necessarily having to do with people. In “Athanasia,” in 1857, Edmund Hamilton Sears included this: “The outward bark..scaling off that the tree may expand with more thrift and freedom.” THAT meaning of “thrift” is also, by now, obsolete. You don’t hear anybody saying “now there’s a dog in good thrift”.
A relatively short-lived usage of “thrift” seems to have arisen in the early 1800s but died out after about a century or so; this sense of “thrift” meant “growing pains”. Samuel Pegge, helpfully, defined it in his “Supplement to the Provincial Glossary of F. Grose” in 1814: “Thrift, the pain which young persons feel in growing.” It’s not clear where this usage came from, but it’s gone by now so I suppose we don’t have to worry too much about knowing what the kids mean when they complain about “thrift”.
The current meaning of “thrift” is, for the most part, frugality; being careful with your money. It’s also, somewhat less often, used to mean your savings. “Frugality” and its benefits, in fact, has been another meaning of “thrift” that’s existed alongside all the others for just about the whole history of the word. In 1570, Peter Levens wrote a sort of dictionary called the “Manipulus vocabulorum” that defined “thrift” that way: “Thrift, frugalitas atis.” He defined it in Latin, but his entry means “frugality” or “economy.” By 1600, in “A geographical historie of Africa, written in Arabicke and Italian,” John Pory translated it more clearly: “These people are well given to thrift and good husbandry.”
There’s another somewhat jargon-y use of “thrift” that’s quite recent; a “thrift” is another word for a savings and loan association in the US. This was particularly heavily used in the 1980s when there was a gigantic scandal in the US involving those institutions: “In an effort to keep the funds, banks and thrifts will fire a fusillade of advertising.” (Chicago Sun-Times, Sept 12, 1982). Talking about a“fusillade of advertising” is definitely not being thrifty with your words.
But wait, there’s more. During the 1500s, a “thrift” was a name for a kind of plant. Evidently it was somewhat related to the plant’s ability to grow in and among rocks with very little soil (perhaps it was a “thrifty” plant): “The lesse Semperuiuum, that we call thrift or great stone crop, groweth in walles, rockes, mudwalles,..it hath manye stalkes comming from one root.” The “stone orpine,” which is what the plant is more commonly called, may in fact have been called a “thrift” by only one person: William Turner. He was a naturalist in the 1500s and published at least three books including “Names of Herbs”, in which he repeatedly called the stone orpine (or “stonecrop”) “thrift”. But there aren’t any citations after his last publication in 1562, so it seems his campaign to use the word “thrift” in a different way didn’t really catch on.
There’s also a different plant called a thrift. This one is flowering plant found at the seashore and more often called “seagrass,” “seapink,” or “sea gillyflower.” This use of “thrift” was much more successful than Turner’s; the first citation of this usage is from 1592: “The weed they so wrangled for, was a little dapper flowre, like a grounde Hunnisuckle, called thrift.” And the most recent is from 1863: “The thrift with its rose coloured flower heads was very abundant.”
And not only that — there’s Yet Another Plant called a “thrift!” Actually more like a family of plants, this is the “great thrift,” “plantain thrift,” “lavender thrift,” or “prickly thrift.” The “prickly thrift” is described in the OED as “a pretty garden rock-plant.” That idea of plants growing well in rocky places seems to have something to do with them being called “thrifts.”
In any case, it would be a lot of thrift, but a thrifty gardener with sufficient thrift to manage a lot of shopping — the thrifty choice would be to look in thrift shops — might find a nice set of vases for planting all varieties of thrifts. Who knows, with the right care they might all thrive.
