meagre
pronunciation
How to pronounce meagre in British English:
UK [ˈmiːɡə(r)]
How to pronounce meagre in American English:
US [ˈmiːɡər]
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- Adjective:
- deficient in amount or quality or extent
Word Origin
- meagre
- meagre: [14] Meagre originally meant literally ‘thin’ (it goes back via Anglo-Norman megre and Old French maigre to Latin macer ‘thin’, source also of English emaciate [17]). Not until the 16th century did the modern figurative sense ‘scanty’ begin to emerge. (Its distant Indo- European ancestor, incidentally, *makró-, also produced a parallel Germanic form mager ‘thin’, shared by German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish.)=> emaciate
- meagre (adj.)
- chiefly British English spelling of meager (q.v.); for spelling, see -re.
Example
- 1. Budgets for running jails tend to be meagre .
- 2. Its nominal gdp-growth targets are meagre .
- 3. My attainments were few , my knowledge of life meagre , and both in my poetry and my prose the sentiment exceeded the substance .
- 4. Meagre returns have not helped .
- 5. Britain fails to hand out even its meagre allocation of work visas .