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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Poverty \Pov"er*ty\ (p[o^]v"[~e]r*t[y^]), noun [OE. poverte, OF. povert['e], F. pauvret['e], fr. L. paupertas, fr. pauper poor. See {Poor}.]
1. The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need. ''Swathed in numblest poverty.'' --Keble.
The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty. --Prov. xxiii. 21.
2. Any deficiency of elements or resources that are needed or desired, or that constitute richness; as, poverty of soil; poverty of the blood; poverty of ideas.
{Poverty grass} (Bot.), a name given to several slender grasses (as {Aristida dichotoma}, and {Danthonia spicata}) which often spring up on old and worn-out fields.
Syn: Indigence; penury; beggary; need; lack; want; scantiness; sparingness; meagerness; jejuneness.
Usage: {Poverty}, {Indigence}, {Pauperism}. Poverty is a relative term; what is poverty to a monarch, would be competence for a day laborer. Indigence implies extreme distress, and almost absolute destitution. Pauperism denotes entire dependence upon public charity, and, therefore, often a hopeless and degraded state.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
poverty
noun: the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions [syn: {poorness}, {impoverishment}] [ant: {wealth}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
44 Moby Thesaurus words for "poverty": beggary, dearth, destitution, difficulty, distress, embarrassment, exigency, hand-to-mouth existence, hardship, impecuniousness, impoverishment, inadequacy, indigence, insolvency, insufficiency, juncture, lack, mendicancy, necessity, need, neediness, pass, paucity, pauperism, pennilessness, penury, pinch, poorness, privation, rareness, rarity, scant, scant sufficiency, scantiness, scarceness, scarcity, shortage, sparseness, sparsity, strait, suffering, uncommonness, unprosperousness, want
From THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY ((C)1911 Released April 15 1993) [devils]:
POVERTY, noun A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. The number of plans for its abolition equals that of the reformers who suffer from it, plus that of the philosophers who know nothing about it. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.
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