Penury is extreme and grinding poverty. Live in penury, reduced to penury, die in penury.
It is stronger than poverty and belongs to formal or literary writing rather than to speech. Penury describes a state with no reserve of any kind rather than simply having little money.
1nounpenuryExtreme and grinding poverty.
“He died in penury owning nothing but the papers.”
penury is a state.
Latin penuria means need or scarcity, and English took it through Middle French in the fifteenth century.
Proto-Indo-European
*peh₁- — to hate; to hurt
Latin
pēnūria — need, scarcity, want
Middle English
penuri
English, today
penury
Built from
From Late Middle English penuri, penurie (“destitution, need, poverty; dearth, lack, scarcity”), borrowed from Latin pēnūria (“need, scarcity, want”) + Middle English -i, -ie; further etymology uncertain, possibly related to paene (“almost, nearly; barely, hardly, scarcely”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European peh₁- (“to hate; to hurt”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA