penury
nounEtymology
From Late Middle English penuri, penurie (“destitution, need, poverty; dearth, lack, scarcity”), borrowed from Latin pēnūria (“need, scarcity, want”) + Middle English -i, -ie (suffix forming abstract and collective nouns); further etymology uncertain, possibly related to paene (“almost, nearly; barely, hardly, scarcely”, adverb), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *peh₁- (“to hate; to hurt”).
- inherited from penuri
Definitions
Extreme need or want
Extreme need or want; destitution, poverty; (countable) an instance of this.
- [W]hat prodigall portion haue I ſpent, that I ſhould come to ſuch penury?
- In all labour there is profit: but the talke of the lippes tendeth onely to penury.
Often followed by of
Often followed by of: a lack of something; a dearth, a scarcity.
- VVith theſe and many others as conſiderable, vvhich partly vvillingly, and partly in the penury of Books, forgettingly I paſſe, […]
- In early youth I laboured under a peculiar embarrassment and penury of words, which I sought to convey my thoughts adequately upon interesting subjects: […]
- No! penury, inertness and grimace, / In some strange sort, were the land's portion.
The quality of being miserly
The quality of being miserly; miserliness, parsimoniousness, stinginess.
- Let them not ſtill be obſtinately blind, / Still to divert the Good thou haſt deſign'd, / Or vvith Malignant penury, / To ſterve the Royal Vertues of his Mind.
- Jenk[ins]. Prithee, novv you are in Spirits, give me a Portrait of Sir Penurious; […] I knovv no more of him than the common Country Converſation; that he is a thrifty, vvary Man. / Har[top]. The very Abſtract of Penury!
The neighborhood
- neighborpenurious
- neighborpenuriously
- neighborpenuriousness
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for penury. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA