Pelf

Property or riches.

Found in Alex­is de Toc­queville’s Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca. I was sur­prised to find such a short word I was unac­quant­ed with, and at first I thought I might have dis­cov­ered a typo in my edi­tion. How­ev­er, it did­n’t make sense in the con­text of the sen­tence, so I turned to the dic­tio­nary and learned a new four-let­ter word.