Poverty
['pɒvətɪ] or ['pɑvɚti]
Definition
(noun.) the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions.
Editor: Tess--From WordNet
Definition
(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.
Typist: Nigel
Synonyms and Synonymous
n. Indigence, penury, want, destitution, need, necessity, privation, distress, straitened circumstances.
Edited by Carlos
Synonyms and Antonyms
SYN:Want, need, indigence, destitution,[See WANT]
Editor: Thea
Definition
n. the state of being poor: necessity: want: meanness: defect.—adjs. Pov′erty-strick′en Pov′erty-struck reduced to a state of poverty: in great suffering from poverty.
Checker: Rene
Unserious Contents or Definition
n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. The number of plans for its abolition equals that of the reformers who suffer from it plus that of the philosophers who know nothing about it. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.
Typist: Remington
Examples
- Love, and her child, Hope, which can bestow wealth on poverty, strength on the weak, and happiness on the sorrowing. Mary Shelley. The Last Man.
- If you are in poverty or affliction I shall be truly glad to relieve you if I can,--I shall indeed. Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist.
- No one could have been in direr poverty than he when the steamboat landed him in New York in 1869. Frank Lewis Dyer. Edison, His Life and Inventions.
- Poverty is exactly what I have determined against. Jane Austen. Mansfield Park.
- Many that want food and clothing have cheerier lives and brighter prospects than she had; many, harassed by poverty, are in a strait less afflictive. Charlotte Bronte. Shirley.
- Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime. Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre.
- That ravenous second hunger of poverty--the hunger for money--roused them into tumult and activity in a moment. Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White.
- You are sore about your poverty; you brood over that. Charlotte Bronte. Shirley.
- He resumed-- And since I am myself poor and obscure, I can offer you but a service of poverty and obscurity. Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre.
- So dearly do I love the scene of my poverty and your kindness. Charles Dickens. Little Dorrit.
- A certain degree of poverty produces contempt; but a degree beyond causes compassion and good-will. David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature.
- A land of money-worship, a land of noisy steam-engines, a land of poverty and wealth—extremes in both cases. Fergus Hume. The Island of Fantasy.
- I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein_Or_The Modern Prometheus.
- Alive in poverty and in hiding. Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White.
- Pardon me, sir,' returned Mrs Wilfer, correcting him, 'it is the abode of conscious though independent Poverty. Charles Dickens. Our Mutual Friend.
Editor: Solomon