poverty

poverty, indigence, penury, want, destitution, privation all denote the state of one who is poor or without enough to live upon.

Poverty, the most comprehensive of these terms, typically implies such deficiency of resources that one is deprived of many of the necessities and of all of the comforts of life

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in Syria he feathered his nest so successfully that in two years he raised himself from poverty to opulence— Buchan

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complaining of his poverty as if it were a new invention and he its first victim— Malamud

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Indigence, often opposed to affluence, does not suggest dire or absolute poverty, but it does imply reduced or straitened circumstances and therefore usually connotes the endurance of many hardships and the lack of comforts

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reduced to indigence in his old age

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our newfound European indigence now makes us more materialistic than we used to pride ourselves on being— Times Lit. Sup.

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Penury may or may not imply abject poverty, but it does suggest such a degree of need, especially of money, that one is cramped or oppressed by it

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chill Penury repressed their noble rage— Gray

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she has to take anything she can get in the way of a husband rather than face penury— Shaw

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But penury may imply the semblance of poverty that comes from miserliness or penuriousness (compare penurious under STINGY)

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her relatives considered that the penury of her table discredited the Mingott name, which had always been associated with good living— Wharton

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Want (see also LACK) and destitution both imply an extreme of poverty that leaves one without the basic necessities of life; both terms, but especially the latter, often imply starvation and homelessness or the urgent need of help

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he is in great want

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here to the homeless child of want my door is open still— Goldsmith

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sinking stage by stage from indigence to squalor, from squalor to grimy destitution— Mumford

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Privation, though implying a state that is comparable to the one suggested by indigence, does not, as the latter term does, necessarily suggest poverty ; although it implies a condition of being without many of the comforts and sometimes of the necessities of existence or having only an insufficient supply of them, it may connote another cause of such a condition than a lack of money or of possessions of value

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an explorer must undergo prolonged privations

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months of privation after the crop failure had left them ill-nour- ished

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Analogous words: necessity, *need, exigency: strait, pass, pinch (see JUNCTURE)

Antonyms: riches