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meagre

UK/ˈmiːɡə/US/ˈmiːɡəɹ/
adjectiveB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,294 of 15,258neutral

Meagre means far too small in amount. A meagre wage, meagre rations, meagre returns.

The complaint is that it falls short of what is needed rather than simply being small — a meagre meal leaves you hungry. It is formal and slightly literary. Note the American spelling meager; and that the French maigre means thin, from the Latin macer, which also gives emaciated.

Definitions of meagre

  1. 1adjectivemeagreFar too small in amount.B2+

    “The workers complained about their meagre wages, which barely paid the rent.”

    synonyms: scanty, paltry

meagre is a quality of insufficiency.

Also accepted in games: meager

Where it comes from

Middle French maigre means thin, from Latin macer. Emaciate comes from the same thinness.

  1. Middle French

    maigre

  2. English, today

    meagre

From Middle French maigre.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Sharper Adjectives

Practise this word

meagre in the wild

  • A countable union of nowhere dense sets is called a meagre set.

    Nowhere dense set

  • Pappa al pomodoro originated with the Tuscan tenant farmer as a way to use their meagre supply of tomatoes.

    Pappa al pomodoro

  • The brown meagre or corb (Sciaena umbra) is a species of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Sciaenidae, the drums and croakers.

    Brown meagre

  • The dual Borel conjecture states that every strongly meagre set is countable.

    Strong measure zero set

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the maigre family

meagermeagre

meagre — used about once every 20,553 pages · #13,294 · point at the bar for the others