Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Deficient in quantity, fullness, or extent; scanty.
- adj. Deficient in richness, fertility, or vigor; feeble: the meager soil of an eroded plain.
- adj. Having little flesh; lean.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Lean; thin; having little flesh.
- Without richness or fertility; barren: said of land.
- Without moisture; dry and harsh: said of chalk, etc.
- Without fullness, strength, substance, or value; deficient in quantity or quality; scanty; poor; mean.
- Lenten; adapted to a fast. See maigre.
- Synonyms Spare, emaciated, lank, gaunt.
- 2 and Tame, barren, bald, jejune, dull, prosing.
- n. A sickness.
- n. Same as maigre, 2.
- n. A spent salmon, or kelt.
- To make lean.
Wiktionary
- adj. Having little flesh; lean; thin.
- adj. Poor, deficient or inferior in amount, quality or extent; paltry; scanty; inadequate; unsatisfying.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Destitue of, or having little, flesh; lean.
- adj. Destitute of richness, fertility, strength, or the like; defective in quantity, or poor in quality; poor; barren; scanty in ideas; wanting strength of diction or affluence of imagery. Opposite of
ample . - adj. (Min.) Dry and harsh to the touch, as chalk.
- adj. less than a desirable amount; -- of items distributed from a larger supply.
- v. obsolete To make lean.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. deficient in amount or quality or extent
Etymologies
- From Anglo-Norman megre, Old French maigre, from Latin macer. Akin to Old English mæġer ("meager, lean"), Dutch, German mager, Old Norse magr whence the Icelandic magur. (Wiktionary)
- Middle English megre, thin, from Old French, from Latin macer; see māk- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Republicans on both committees complained about the speed at which the bills are being pushed through the legislature, the lack of hearings on the proposals and what they called the meager information about what they would actually cost per job created.”
“McCain started off his campaign stacking his long resume against what he characterized as the meager accomplishments of slick talking Ivy League upstart.”
Capitol Hill Blue - The oldest political news site on the Internet
“Miss Blau's temperament is not adapted to the type of regimentation which occurs nowadays when only intense cooperations make it possible to obtain meager results from a tremendously expensive piece of apparatus. 23”
“They handed them out in meager portions, a dollar at a time if you were lucky, so each quarter had to last.”
“I admit freely, that I don't choose to live in meager circumstances, and indeed many of my neighbors have a great deal more than I do economically, and educations that surpass my mere 4 years of University training, which is why they have no problem purchasing the $200.000.00 homes in my neighborhood and purchasing all the anemities that go with this lifestyle.”
“Otherwise, he would live, and that meant eating whatever his captors gave him in meager portions twice a day: fish heads, fish scales, leaves and rice.”
“1 Some may quibble with our use of the word "meager" here to refer to a correlation of .30.”
“The bigger problem is that Social Security's payout is so meager, which is problematic since it has been thrust into this new role as a de facto national retirement plan.”
The Huffington Post: Steven Hill: Don't cut Social Security, DOUBLE it
“At first glance, however, the macrobotanical evidence seems to be rather meager, which is not surprising for a workshop that specialized in high-quality ceramic, metal, bone, and glass products.”
“Minneapolis' stadium plan, which Dayton termed "meager" only a week ago, would redirect existing city sales taxes being used to financially help the city's convention center.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘meager’.
-
GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
-
CULI - wine-tasting adjectives
In this area of expertise nouns are frequently used as adjectives (almond, bacon, cider, diesel, fennel, fresh-cut hay, wool) or new adjectives are formed (appley, berrylike, citrusy, full-bodied, ...
acetic, acidic, aged, angular, appley, astringent, attractive, austere, berrylike, big, bitter, brawny and 511 more...
-
Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11184 more...
-
GRE
predilection, explicit, appeal, supplication, appealing, enchanting, ovation, pertinent, apropos, opportunely, applicable, germane and 381 more...
-
-ager
Any word ending in -ager. And because I'm feeling generous tonight, I'll even let in words ending in -adger.
voyager, teenager, wager, pager, manager, dowager, badger, cadger, lager, rager, mumager, tanager and 14 more...
-
big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
-
capitalcreative's Words
deviltry, visceral, cassanova, assuage, genesis, hot minute, osmosis, wistful, sublime, loathe, farfetched, newfangled and 283 more...
-
eggplantia5's Words
scintillate, marvel, cranberry, oscillate, triumph, bamboozle, grimace, magical, book, hexagon, cipher, compendium and 2727 more...
-
The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
-
Prep my Lang
Collection of my wordnik word search
equivocal, anomaly, proliferate, assimilate, obscure, aberration, parse, circumnavigate, circumvent, decipher, prose, impasse and 94 more...
-
Cessilind's Words
dvorak, ingenuity, cessation, oblique, transverse, anvilicious, evoke, verisimilitude, integrity, strega, recumbent, depression and 164 more...
-
Aequoria's list
affect, deleterious, nuance, pliant, verbatim, pertinent, latter, municipality, provincial, voyeuristic, circumlocution, wane and 798 more...
-
ADW1
obdurate, obstinate, behest, injunction, enjoin, circumspect, ensconce, discursive, lugubrious, doleful, somber, ken and 2476 more...
-
Revised GRE Wordlist_2013
Vocabulary building for my quest of GRE 2013
ephemeral, esoteric, rhetoric, censure, egregious, pittance, dupe, mulct, paucity, alacrity, maintain, laconic and 997 more...
-
G & G
GRE , GMAT , TOEFL , IELTS , SAT 。。。
alphabet soup, vernacular, aberrant, abeyance, abet, recant, contrite, reiterate, patois, skew, senate, deliberative and 179 more...
-
My List
A list of words that I have generated over time.
cairn, cacodaemoniacal, abash, abject, abjure, abstemious, abhor, abnegate, abnegation, abscond, abstruse, acclivity and 702 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for meager.
Comments
No comments yet...
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.