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penurious

US/pəˈnjʊɹ.i.əs/
adjectiveC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #15,134 of 15,258Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Penurious means very poor, or extremely mean with money. A penurious existence, penurious with praise, penurious old age.

The two senses are far apart, since one is a misfortune and the other a fault, and only the context tells you which. Somebody penurious in the first sense is destitute rather than merely short of money.

Svetlana Grechkina · CC BY-SA 2.0

Definitions of penurious

  1. 1adjectivepenuriousVery poor, or extremely mean with money.C2

    “The penurious student lived on bread and beans until his next loan came through.”

penurious is a quality.

Where it comes from

Medieval Latin penuriosus comes from Latin penuria, want or need.

  1. Medieval Latin

    pēnūriōsus

  2. English, today

    penurious

From Medieval Latin pēnūriōsus. See penury from Latin penuria (“want”), related to paene (“scarcely”), c. 1400. Compare French pénurie.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

penurious in the wild

  • The father of Mary Service followed this profession, and was a man of penurious habits and peevish temper.

    John Ferguson (Ferguson bequest)

  • Henry Roraback built up a political machine which was "efficient, conservative, penurious, and in absolute control".

    United States presidential elections in Connecticut

  • Throughout her lifetime, she wrote poems about her penurious and challenging childhood as well as her love life and marriages.

    Yaşar Nezihe

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.