Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The condition of a pauper; pauperism.
  • noun Paupers collectively.

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

  • noun The state of being a pauper.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • This is the attitude that encourages people to believe that taxes are somehow a gimmick to force us all into pauperdom at the expense of some amorphous government, rather than a way to pay for public goods and services.

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  • The terror of sudden pauperdom, she says in "The Bag Lady Papers," an account of her financial disaster, has for various reasons also struck Gloria Steinem, Lily Tomlin, Shirley MacLaine "and many other accomplished, well-off women."

    Re-Evaluating Her Sense of Self 2010

  • The terror of sudden pauperdom, she says in "The Bag Lady Papers," an account of her financial disaster, has for various reasons also struck Gloria Steinem, Lily Tomlin, Shirley MacLaine "and many other accomplished, well-off women."

    Re-Evaluating Her Sense of Self 2010

  • In the great depression their remains decorated the pavements of Wall Street while ordinary people with real lives and children to feed were reduced to pauperdom and a life on the roads.

    Hubris Ms Robinson 2008

  • “Because all men are thy foes by reason of the wealth and the worlds thou hast won: while all men are my true friends, because of my contentment and pauperdom, for that I possess nothing, neither covet aught of the goods of life; I have no desire to them nor wish for them, neither reck I aught save contentment.”

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • After all, I am only a surgeon who has bungled himself into pauperdom.

    New Grub Street 2003

  • It may be useful to recall some of the many systems identified and analyzed in the Political Register, though this risks the condescending parody into which Cobbett criticism has too often degenerated: system of conquest smothering system barracks system system of pauperdom system of anti-Jacobinism comforting system system of public corruption system of slavery cow system child-bed-linen system church-going system industry system system of finance military system monkish system

    William Cobbett and the Politics of System 1997

  • Or where, if I break up my shop, where is safety from pauperdom and hunger?

    There Will Be Time Anderson, Poul, 1926-2001 1972

  • Or where, if I break up my shop, where is safety from pauperdom and hunger?

    Two in Time Anderson, Poul 1970

  • Hance had sprouted from pauperdom and had bloomed into princedom, and his newly acquired partner placed the final mouldings and decorations to his life.

    Skookum Chuck Fables Bits of History, Through the Microscope

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