improvident

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How are the 'improvident'--'harum-scarums' to live if you are not present to minister to their wants--upon the best of security?"

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Definitions (7)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (2)

  1. adjective Not providing for the future; thriftless.
  2. adjective Rash; incautious.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (2)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

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Examples (50)

  • In his disposition, he appears to have been careless, improvident, and sanguine; easily swayed both in his commendation and censures of others, by the reigning humour of the moment, yet warm, and (when not influenced by the baneful spirit of faction) steady in his attachments. —  Lives of the English Poets
  • The GOP (indeed, all Americans) needs to ask itself whether a government that so exceeds its constitutional mandates is one the American people have any reason to respect-and to realize the extent to which it is complicit in the out-of-control, improvident, destructive beast the U.S. government is. —  Latest Articles
  • As almost all savages are improvident, and none more so than the North American Indians, were they prevented for a season from going out to hunt, whole tribes would starve. —  The Young Voyageurs Boy Hunters in the North
  • With a clean Gillott he fetches down a capitalist, at three or six months, for a cool hundred or a round thousand; just as a Scrope drops over a stag at ten, or a Gordon Cumming a monstrous male elephant at a hundred paces As I before observed, my connection, especially lies among the improvident--among those who will be ruined--who are being ruined--and who have been ruined. —  The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852
  • The poorer classes of society, are proverbially improvident--and yours, in sickness, and in old age, are often victims of want and suffering. —  Aunt Phillis's Cabin Or, Southern Life As It Is
 

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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (1)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. = Portuguese improvidente, from Latin improviden(t-)s, *inproviden(t-)s (in deriv. improvidentia and contr. impruden(t-)s: see imprudent), equivalent to improvidus (later Italian Portuguese improvido = Spanish impróvido), unforesighted, from in-privative + providus, foresighted: see provident.
 

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/ɪmˈprɑvɪdənt/
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