Meaning & use
poverty
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Meanings
noununcountable
The condition of not having enough money to pay for basic things like food, housing and clothing.
Grammar: Uncountable: live in poverty, never a poverty or poverties for this sense.
Patterns
- live in poverty
- poverty among someone
Millions of families around the world still live in poverty.
She grew up in poverty but earned a scholarship to university.
The charity works to lift children out of poverty.
noununcountablefigurativeformal
A serious shortage of some good quality or thing.
Grammar: Used with of: a poverty of ideas.
Patterns
- a poverty of something
Critics pointed to the poverty of imagination in the film's plot.
There was a real poverty of ideas at the meeting.
The poverty of the soil made farming difficult.
Common combinations
- live in poverty
- A third of the village lives in poverty.
- escape poverty
- Education gave him a way to escape poverty.
- extreme poverty
- Extreme poverty remains common in some regions.
- poverty line
- Their income fell below the poverty line.
- child poverty
- The government promised new measures to reduce child poverty.
- poverty of imagination
- The report criticized a poverty of imagination in city planning.
Synonyms and how they differ
- destitution
- Destitution is more extreme, meaning having almost nothing at all, whereas poverty can be a milder or ongoing shortage.
- hardship
- Hardship describes a difficult period or burden and does not have to involve long-term lack of money.
- penury
- Penury is a formal, somewhat literary word for severe lack of money.
Opposites
Word family
- poor adjective
- having little money
- impoverish verb
- to make very poor
- impoverished adjective
- made or left poor
- poorly adverb
- in a bad way
Commonly confused: poverty or povertyline?
poverty vs povertyline
Always write poverty line as two words; it means the income level below which a person is officially considered poor.
Practice
The new program aims to lift thousands of families out of ____.
Choose one answer.
After the preposition of, a noun is needed, and poverty is the noun. Poor is an adjective and cannot follow out of here.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “poverty”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.