indigence
noun
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Is your vocabulary impoverished by a lack of synonyms for indigence? We can help. Poverty, penury, want, and destitution all describe the state of someone who is lacking in key resources. Poverty covers the range from severe lack of basic necessities to an absence of material comforts ("the refugees lived in extreme poverty"). Penury suggests a cramping or oppressive lack of money ("illness condemned him to years of penury"). Want and destitution imply extreme, even life-threatening, poverty ("lived in a perpetual state of want"; "the widespread destitution in countries beset by famine"). Indigence, which descends from a Latin verb meaning "to need," implies seriously straitened circumstances and usually connotes the endurance of many hardships and the lack of comforts.
Synonyms
Examples of indigence in a Sentence
Nick Foulkes, theweek, 7 Nov. 2024
In its first three years, Bolsa Família cut extreme poverty by 15 percent, and by 2014, the percentage of Brazilians living in indigence had been slashed to less than three percent—a level the World Bank considers equivalent to eradication.
—Jonathan Tepperman, Foreign Affairs, 14 Dec. 2015
The Misses Arkell had been prepared, as the Professor put it, to minister to his spiritual indigence; but while there was much to be done in the way of instruction, they were reluctantly obliged to admit that exhortation and admonition were superfluous.
—Edith Wharton, The Atlantic, 9 Nov. 2020
Splendor and indigence are equally familiar to him; prudence and shame are equally alien.
—Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, 20 June 2022
Black and Hispanic Americans escaped indigence in record numbers.
—Washington Post, 18 Mar. 2022
His children, three former child prodigies, are to blame for his financial indigence.
—CNN, 13 Dec. 2021
William Booth’s famous poverty maps, which the social reformer used to catalogue affluence and indigence in late Victorian London, don’t extend this far south.
—Washington Post, 12 Feb. 2021
Under Harris County’s rigid and misguided risk-assessment system, indicators of indigence received the same point values as a history of criminal violations or prior failures to appear in court.
—Gilbert Garcia, ExpressNews.com, 12 Feb. 2020
Dictionary Entries Near indigence
Cite this Entry
“Indigence.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indigence. Accessed 30 Nov. 2024.
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indigence
noun
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indigence
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