meager
English
Alternative forms
Etymology
From Middle English megre, from Anglo-Norman megre, Old French maigre, from Latin macer, from Proto-Indo-European *mh₂ḱrós. Akin, through the Indo-European root, to Old English mæġer (“meager, lean”), West Frisian meager (“meager”), Dutch mager (“meager”), German mager, Icelandic magr whence the Icelandic magur, Norwegian Bokmål mager and Danish mager. Doublet of maigre.
Pronunciation
- (General American) IPA(key): /ˈmiɡɚ/
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈmiːɡə/
Audio (US) (file) - Rhymes: -iːɡə(ɹ)
- Hyphenation: mea‧ger
Adjective
meager (comparative meagerer, superlative meagerest) (American spelling) (Canadian spelling, common)
- Having little flesh; lean; thin.
- Poor, deficient or inferior in amount, quality or extent
- Synonyms: paltry, scanty, inadequate, measly
- A meager piece of cake in one bite.
- The street outside my window furnishes meager entertainment.
- 2002, Huang Chin-shing, Business as a Vocation: The Autobiography of Wu Ho-Su, Harvard University Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 26:
- Making the run from Taipei to Panchiao every day to sell the gold-colored paper, he scraped together a meager livelihood.
- (set theory) Of a set: such that, considered as a subset of a (usually larger) topological space, it is in a precise sense small or negligible.
- Antonym: dense
- (mineralogy) Dry and harsh to the touch (e.g., as chalk).
Synonyms
- See also Thesaurus:impoverished
Derived terms
Descendants
- Jamaican Creole: mawga
Translations
lean
|
poor, deficient or inferior
|
- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Verb
meager (third-person singular simple present meagers, present participle meagering, simple past and past participle meagered)
- (American spelling, transitive) To make lean.
West Frisian
Etymology
From Old Frisian *māger, from Proto-Germanic *magraz, from Proto-Indo-European *mh₂ḱrós.
Inflection
Inflection of meager | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
uninflected | meager | |||
inflected | meagere | |||
comparative | meagerder | |||
positive | comparative | superlative | ||
predicative/adverbial | meager | meagerder | it meagerst it meagerste | |
indefinite | c. sing. | meagere | meagerdere | meagerste |
n. sing. | meager | meagerder | meagerste | |
plural | meagere | meagerdere | meagerste | |
definite | meagere | meagerdere | meagerste | |
partitive | meagers | meagerders | — |
Further reading
- “meager”, in Wurdboek fan de Fryske taal (in Dutch), 2011
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