GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English

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Found one definition

1.       
   Poverty , n. [OE. poverte, OF. poverté, F. pauvreté, fr. L. paupertas, fr. pauper poor. See Poor.]
   The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need. “Swathed in numblest poverty.”  
   Keble.
   
   1913 Webster
   The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty.
   Prov. xxiii. 21.
   
   1913 Webster
   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.
   1913 Webster
   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.
   1913 Webster
   Syn. -- Indigence; penury; beggary; need; lack; want; scantiness; sparingness; meagerness; jejuneness.  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.
   1913 Webster