Scarce means there is so little left that everybody competes for it. Water is scarce, scarce resources, jobs were scarce.
In economics, scarcity is the founding idea of the whole subject: wants are unlimited and resources are not. Make yourself scarce is an informal phrase meaning to leave quickly and not be found. As an adverb, scarcely means barely or hardly — scarcely enough, scarcely had he sat down. Note scarcity, the noun, and that scarce describes supply against demand rather than simply small quantity.
1adjectivescarceSo little available that everybody competes for it.
“Food was scarce during the war, and people queued for hours for bread.”
synonyms: rare, in short supply
scarce is a state of shortage.
Also accepted in games: rare
Old French escars comes from a Latin word meaning plucked out or reduced. The word has always meant not enough rather than merely few, which is why it works so well in economics.
Proto-Indo-European
*kerp-
Latin
*scarpsus
fro-nor
scars
Middle English
scars
English, today
scarce
Built from
From Middle English scars, scarse, from fro-nor scars, escars "sparing, niggard, parsimonious, miserly, poor"; > French échars, Medieval Latin scarsus (“diminished, reduced”), of uncertain origin. One theory is that it derives originally from a Latin scarpsus, excarpsus, a participle form of excarpere (“take out”), from Latin ex- + carpere; yet the sense evolution is difficult to trace. Compare Middle Dutch schaers (“scarce”), Middle Dutch schaers (“a pair of shears, plowshare”), scheeren (“to shear”). The standard pronunciation having the vowel instead of expected is due to a tendency for Old and Middle French preconsonantal to be borrowed as Middle English that only survives in this word and dace in the modern standard, but is more frequent in Early Modern English and traditional dialects; compare Scots gairden (“garden”), lairge (“large”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA