Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.
- n. Deficiency in amount; scantiness: "the poverty of feeling that reduced her soul” ( Scott Turow).
- n. Unproductiveness; infertility: the poverty of the soil.
- n. Renunciation made by a member of a religious order of the right to own property.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The state or condition of being poor; need or scarcity of means of subsistence; needy circumstances; indigence; penury.
- n. The quality of being poor; a lack of necessary or desirable elements, constituents, or qualities. Lack of fertility or productiveness: as, the poverty of the soil.
- n. Lack of richness of tone; thinness (of sound).
- n. Dearth; scantiness; small allowance.
- n. Poor things; objects or productions of little value.
- n. The poor; poor people collectively. Compare the quality, used for persons of quality.
- n. Synonyms Poverty, Want, Indigence, Penury, Destitution, Pauperism, Need, neediness, necessitousness, privation, beggary. Poverty is a strong word, stronger than being poor; want is still stronger, indicating that one has not even the necessaries of life: indigence is often stronger than want, implying especially, also, the lack of those things to which one has been used and that befit one's station; penury is poverty that is severe to abjectness; destitution is the state of having absolutely nothing; pauperism is a poverty by which one is thrown upon public charity for support; need is a general word, definite only in suggesting the necessity for immediate relief. None of these words is limited to the lack of property, although that is naturally a prominent fact under each.
- n. and Meagerness, jejuneness.
Wiktionary
- n. The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need.
- n. Any deficiency of elements or resources that are needed or desired, or that constitute richness; as, poverty of soil; poverty of the blood; poverty of ideas.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need.
- n. Any deficiency of elements or resources that are needed or desired, or that constitute richness
WordNet 3.0
- n. the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions
Etymologies
- Middle English poverte, from Old French, from Latin paupertās, from pauper, poor; see pau-1 in Indo-European roots.
Examples
“The species of poverty, most esteemed by Religion, is _poverty of mind_.”
“The Arabs say: '_God preserve us from overwhelming poverty; and from the company of him whom he loves not, namely, the infidel_': -- And there is a tradition of the prophet -- that '_poverty has a gloomy aspect in this world and in the next_!”
“Census Bureau figures indicate the number of Americans in poverty is the highest in more than half a century.”
“I am not arguing that having new immigrant families and young families start out in poverty is morally satisfactory.”
Kling vs. Lang, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“Having a safety net to take care of people in poverty is important.”
“In the United States to-day there are fifteen million8 people living in poverty; and by poverty is meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained.”
“The Chávez-influenced states are largely poor; the percentage of people living in poverty is more than 60 percent in Bolivia.”
“Still, it strikes me as odd that conservatives seem so convinced that a set of countries whose populations are healthier and longer-lived, and where dramatically fewer children grow up in poverty, is somehow obviously a dystopian nightmare.”
“Re: and where dramatically fewer children grow up in poverty, is somehow obviously a dystopian nightmare.”
“Given the economic reasons are a primary one for abortions, and someone in poverty is more likely to * have* an abortion in the first place, social conditions are huge.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘poverty’.
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Headlines & Newsmakers
frugality, environment, extinction, bible, killer, jazz, cloning, dead, god, moon, global warming, bailout and 338 more...
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catalysts
catalysts leading to action.
trauma, death, tragedy, embarrassment, epiphany, move, literature, brink, poll numbers, innovation, injustice, another headspace and 5 more...
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Words ending with ty
ability, dexterity, affinity, abnormality, identity, deity, poverty, animosity, duty, city, paty, majority and 3 more...
reesetee Oh, but it's entertaining! Please, quote all you want. :-) And Stephen Crane's a great choice, too. Sep 22, 2007
npydyuan Yes... I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love the way the guys harangue and cuss at each other, but it all still sounds so civilised. Anyway, I finished it, so I'll stop inundating all these words with Crane quotations, for a while at least. Sep 22, 2007
reesetee Npydyuan, let me guess--you're reading The Third Violet on Project Gutenberg! ;-)
Sounds like fun. I may do the same. Sep 22, 2007
npydyuan "Poverty isn't anything to be ashamed of."
"Great heavens! Have you the temerity to get off that old nonsensical remark? Poverty is everything to be ashamed of. Did you ever see a person not ashamed of his poverty? Certainly not. Of course, when a man gets very rich he will brag so loudly of the poverty of his youth that one would never suppose that he was once ashamed of it. But he was."
Stephen Crane, The Third Violet Sep 22, 2007
oroboros Proper revolutionary "poverty" is not in simply not having useless stuff, but in not even wanting it. "Jeeze", said Fred Everybody, "That's asking a lot!"
--Jan Cox
Apr 6, 2007