Other forms: poorer, poorest
Poor means having very little money. A poor family counting coins for the electricity meter; a poor country where the roads never get mended.
It reaches much further than money. Poor also means bad in quality or amount — poor health, poor eyesight, a poor harvest, a poor excuse — and poor at something means bad at it: poor at maths, poor at remembering names. Put it before a name and it says you feel sorry for the person: poor Anna, she has been waiting an hour. Poor in something means short of it, as in soil poor in nitrogen. The nouns are poverty for the state and the poor for the people, and the comparatives are the plain poorer and poorest. In many accents it sounds the same as pour and paw, which is where the spelling mistakes come from.
1adjectivepoorHaving very little money.~43%
“They were too poor to heat more than one room in winter.”
synonyms: impoverished, hard up, broke
2adjectivesubstandardOf low quality, or too small in amount.~49%
“The light was poor and half the photographs came out grey.”
synonyms: substandard, inadequate
3adjectivegoodNot good at something, or lacking something needed.~6%
“He is a poor swimmer and knows it.”
4adjectivedeservingDeserving pity or sympathy.~2%
“Poor Anna has been standing in the rain for half an hour.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Poor came from Latin pauper by way of Old French povre and Middle English povre, and the Latin traces back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning few or small. English borrowed that Latin word a second time, later and untouched, as pauper — so poor and pauper are twins that arrived centuries apart. The native words for the idea, wantsome and unweli among them, were pushed out and are gone.
Middle English
povre
English, today
poor
Built from
From Middle English povre. Inherited from Middle English povre,povere, from Old French and Anglo-Norman povre,poure, from Latin pauper, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European peh₂w- (“few, small”). a doublet of pauper. Displanced native wantsome, unlede, Middle English unweli,unwely (“poor, unwealthy”)
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA