Word
penurious
Phoneticspenu·ri·ous
/ˌpɛnˈjuɹiəs/
Definition
adj. extremely poor or unwilling to spend any money. You use this to describe someone who has almost no money or someone who is very stingy.
adj. suffering from extreme poverty or exhibiting excessive frugality. Often carries a formal or literary tone when describing a person's financial state or character.
Examples
“The penurious old man refused to buy new clothes.”
“After the business failed, the family was forced to live a penurious existence in a small, unheated apartment.”
“The novel depicts a protagonist whose penurious habits were born not of necessity, but of a deep-seated fear that his modest inheritance might vanish overnight.”
Examples
simple
“The penurious old man refused to buy new clothes.”
contextual
“After the business failed, the family was forced to live a penurious existence in a small, unheated apartment.”
complex
“The novel depicts a protagonist whose penurious habits were born not of necessity, but of a deep-seated fear that his modest inheritance might vanish overnight.”
Usage
Typically used as a predicative adjective after linking verbs like 'live' or 'become', or attributively before 'existence' or 'circumstances'.
Real-World Examples
“This ignorance, we are told, is “explained, if not overexplained … by the fact that Clara comes from an economically and emotionally penurious home – in Yorkshire”.” “Hunniford moved in with 62-year-old Ivy in Darwin, Lancashire, whose disposable income of £3.24 a day – a sum that didn't even allow Hunniford to cook her standard bolognese sauce for her host – stood for the half-million penurious and 1 million malnourished pensioners in the UK: "Sometimes I get really down," admitted Ivy, "and I just want to die.” “Some of his begging letters and responses to those who failed to meet his demands are masterpieces of penurious self-important mendacity: “I hear that you have become rich,” he writes to Robert von Hornstein.” Etymology
From Medieval Latin pēnūriōsus, c. 1400, by way of Latin penuria ("want"), itself related to paene ("scarcely"). The French cognate pénurie preserves the same root.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Synonyms
Scan code
englishreference.com/q/penurious