means The careful management of money and resources to avoid waste — and, more recently, the practice of buying secondhand goods.

from From Old Norse 'þrift,' meaning prosperity or thriving — the noun cousin of the verb 'thrive.' At first thrift simply meant flourishing and good fortune; the path to that flourishing was assumed to run through frugality, so over the centuries the word quietly shifted from the prosperity itself to the careful saving that produced it. The 'thrift shop' sense, where saving and secondhand goods meet, is a much later, chiefly American flowering of the same thrifty root.