Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The quality or condition of being scanty or meager.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Smallness; slenderness; tenuity.
  • noun Scantiness; slightness; meagerness: as, the exiguity of a description.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun rare Scantiness; smallness; thinness.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The quality of being meagre or scanty

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the quality of being meager

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Derived from exiguous.

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Examples

  • The more glaring the contrast through the exiguity of the Capitalist class and its proportionately large individual holdings of the means of production the stronger this feeling.

    Nationalization Part Two 2008

  • If one day it should fall to the ground, it may emit a cloud of dust and leave visible ruins; but, less material even than a palace on the stage, though it has not the same exiguity, it will subside in the magic universe without letting the fall of its heavy blocks of stone tarnish, with anything so vulgar as sound, the chastity of the prevailing silence.

    The Guermantes Way 2003

  • The fairy of folk-lore in Shakespeare's day is nearly everything that the fairies of _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ are; we may possibly except their exiguity, their relations in love with mortals, and their hymeneal functions.

    The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

  • If we look simply at the magnitude of the results obtained, compared with the exiguity of the resources at command, -- if we remember that out of the small Kingdom of Sardinia grew united Italy, we must come to the conclusion that Count Cavour was undoubtedly a statesman of marvellous skill and prescience.

    The Ontario High School Reader A.E. Marty

  • Doubtless because of the exiguity of his organ, he found it necessary to stop the windows of his nose with his fingers in order to smoke.

    The Quest P��o Baroja 1914

  • The absence of rugs or carpets and curtains, the polish and exiguity of the furniture, the general air of having no more in the rooms than that which will just serve the purposes of life did not suit his sense of abundance and luxury.

    The Private Life of Henry Maitland Roberts, Morley, 1857-1942 1912

  • One does not contrast the exiguity of a pint of nitric acid in an engraver's studio with the hundreds of gallons of water in the cisterns of his house.

    The Free Press Hilaire Belloc 1911

  • It is not very easy to see how such very trifling surnames as this last came into existence, but its exiguity is surpassed in the case of a prominent French airman who bears the appropriately buoyant name of

    The Romance of Names Ernest Weekley 1909

  • The marooned seaman saves his sanity by cutting notches in a stick, the solitary prisoner by friendship with a mouse; and when life is reduced to the last exiguity of narrowness, the interests of life will be narrow too.

    The Quest of the Simple Life Dawson, William J 1907

  • His jaw fell; there was a remarkable exiguity about the coat which was inexplicable.

    Stories by English Authors: The Orient (Selected by Scribners) Mary [Contributor] Beaumont 1900

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