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MEAGRE
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I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Deficient in amount or quality or extent
Example:
meager fare
Synonyms:
meager; meagerly; meagre; scrimpy; stingy
Classified under:
Similar:
bare; scanty; spare (lacking in magnitude or quantity)
exiguous (extremely scanty)
hand-to-mouth (providing only bare essentials)
hardscrabble (barely satisfying a lower standard)
measly; miserable; paltry (contemptibly small in amount)
Also:
scarce (deficient in quantity or number compared with the demand)
minimal; minimum (the least possible)
deficient; insufficient (of a quantity not able to fulfill a need or requirement)
Attribute:
adequacy; sufficiency (the quality of being sufficient for the end in view)
Derivation:
meagreness (the quality of being meager)
Context examples:
Fearful, however, of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause, contrived to frame a meagre, though, as far as it went, true response.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
I made his honour my most humble acknowledgments for the good opinion he was pleased to conceive of me, but assured him at the same time, “that my birth was of the lower sort, having been born of plain honest parents, who were just able to give me a tolerable education; that nobility, among us, was altogether a different thing from the idea he had of it; that our young noblemen are bred from their childhood in idleness and luxury; that, as soon as years will permit, they consume their vigour, and contract odious diseases among lewd females; and when their fortunes are almost ruined, they marry some woman of mean birth, disagreeable person, and unsound constitution (merely for the sake of money), whom they hate and despise. That the productions of such marriages are generally scrofulous, rickety, or deformed children; by which means the family seldom continues above three generations, unless the wife takes care to provide a healthy father, among her neighbours or domestics, in order to improve and continue the breed. That a weak diseased body, a meagre countenance, and sallow complexion, are the true marks of noble blood; and a healthy robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality, that the world concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman. The imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, dullness, ignorance, caprice, sensuality, and pride.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
He was professor of physics in the high school, possessor of a large family, a meagre salary, and a select fund of parrot-learned knowledge.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
Good, as goodness might be measured in their particular class, hard-working for meagre wages and scorning the sale of self for easier ways, nervously desirous for some small pinch of happiness in the desert of existence, and facing a future that was a gamble between the ugliness of unending toil and the black pit of more terrible wretchedness, the way whereto being briefer though better paid.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
