What's the difference between lowly and meagre?

Lowly


Definition:

  • (a.) Not high; not elevated in place; low.
  • (a.) Low in rank or social importance.
  • (a.) Not lofty or sublime; humble.
  • (a.) Having a low esteem of one's own worth; humble; meek; free from pride.
  • (adv.) In a low manner; humbly; meekly; modestly.
  • (adv.) In a low condition; meanly.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) You will have to offer leadership and a sense of belonging to the civil service's lowly clerks and frontline staff in the Department for Work and Pensions, struggling not just with Iain Duncan Smith's fantasies of benefit rationalisation, but sharp contractors snapping at their heels.
  • (2) Chelsea, racism and the Premier League’s role | Letters Read more Mighty Manchester United had just been humbled by lowly Leicester City, battered 5-3.
  • (3) Pakistan repeated the trick in the 1990s, sending jihadists to stoke insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir and giving massive assistance to the Taliban, the once lowly mullahs’ movement that had seized control of Afghanistan in 1989.
  • (4) It has exalted the lowly and brought down the mighty from their seats.
  • (5) But one might have imagined Corbyn would have used the opportunity to send one of the really big power players of the new shadow cabinet – his transport spokeswoman Lilian Greenwood, say, or Nia Griffith, who has the Wales portfolio – rather than his lowly shadow chancellor.
  • (6) Historically, our masters have always imagined we lowly peasants will digest information more easily if it is written, for example, in a speech bubble coming out of the mouth of an imaginary squirrel pedestrian in yellow loon pants.
  • (7) Malignant neoplasias consisted of tumorously proliferated, lowly differentiated sebaceous cells.
  • (8) One is a guy who has to try and take a lowly band of unknowns up against far better equipped adversaries, while having been tempted to join the other side, and the other one is … oh, hang on" – James Thomson.
  • (9) Within six years of beginning as a lowly prop assistant, he led the show to national syndication and had an Emmy to show for his efforts.
  • (10) One dev says: "My biggest bugbear at the moment (on my lowly 3GS) is the number of times app quit due to memory shortages, or because they've taken too long to load.
  • (11) An evening transformed by Adomah’s second-half liberation from the bench – (the winger created the excellent Stuani’s second) – ended with Boro looking the more convincing promotion candidates, but Brentford had played well enough to suggest their current lowly position is a false one.
  • (12) With such knowledge comes a predictable illusion of power, though this is all too regularly punctured by the indignity of being kicked out of shiny receptions and told to use an entrance more befitting of our lowly status – or of having my pronunciation of “Southwark Street” incorrectly corrected by a receptionist, who gives her colleague a sidelong smirk, commiserating over my supposed ignorance.
  • (13) In "Marching (As Seen from the Left File)", for instance, he describes the men from the perspective of one of them and in "Break of Day in the Trenches" he identifies with the lowly rat against the "haughty athletes".
  • (14) Basic literacy and numeracy skills are low, meaning that the children who drop out of school are on course for a life in lowly-paid jobs.
  • (15) Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies trace the meteoric rise of Cromwell from the lowly son of a blacksmith to a ruthless political leader.
  • (16) In a telling Japanese ballet production of Bizet's Carmen a few years ago, Carmen was portrayed as a career woman who stole company secrets to get ahead and then framed her lowly security-guard lover José.
  • (17) Material released from the highly tumorigenic cells in response to increased cell density was also fucosylated (whereas shed material from lowly tumorigenic cells was not), suggesting a biological role for shed fucosylated antigens in tumor aggression.
  • (18) The G + C content of the A. nidulans genome is close to 50%, indicating little overall mutational bias, and so the codon usage of lowly expressed genes is as expected in the absence of selection pressure at silent sites.
  • (19) But my colleagues at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - where I spent the summer of 2000 as a lowly research assistant - questioned such reserve.
  • (20) There has been a decade-long legal battle by the Guardian involving rulings by 16 different judges, stretching from a lowly information tribunal to the supreme court, the highest in the land.

Meagre


Definition:

  • (a.) Destitue of, or having little, flesh; lean.
  • (a.) Destitute of richness, fertility, strength, or the like; defective in quantity, or poor in quality; poor; barren; scanty in ideas; wanting strength of diction or affluence of imagery.
  • (a.) Dry and harsh to the touch, as chalk.
  • (v. t.) To make lean.
  • (n.) A large European sciaenoid fish (Sciaena umbra or S. aquila), having white bloodless flesh. It is valued as a food fish.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It has so far returned a mere $6m (£3.6m) of its relatively meagre $28m (£17.1m) budget, according to Forbes, a percentage of just 21%.
  • (2) Those who have escaped form a growing underclass of refugees on the Thai border, where they eke out a meagre living and face deportation at any time.
  • (3) As low interest rates erode the value of people's hard-earned savings, I would also like to see the chancellor allowing higher ISA limits, so that at least any meagre interest people do earn on their savings will not be taxed as well.
  • (4) With the eurozone unravelling and world markets in turmoil, threatening even the meagre recovery the UK economy had achieved since the onset of the credit crunch, he repeatedly evokes a mood of national emergency to explain why the coalition he forged with David Cameron is the right government for the times.
  • (5) The more you tour, the less your subsidy per seat.” That leads to lengthier tours, which keep actors away from their families for meagre weekly wages.
  • (6) Our own data and the meagre results of other studies support the supposition that it is not the absolute time-lapse which has prognostic significance but the qualified medical assistance provided within a critical, individual, but extremely variable time-span.
  • (7) Rats dying acutely of experimental auto-immune encephalomyelitis show very meagre histological signs of the disease in routine histology sections.
  • (8) Clinical benefits have so far been meagre but this is not surprising in view of the poor design of many of the trials and the large tumour burden in many of the patients.
  • (9) who was thinking about voting yes, and went on to reduce her political predicament to her meagre wage packet.
  • (10) Only by being filled out with private savings and pensions – whose value is also depressed by low bank rates – does a meagre state pension provide anything close to a tolerable retirement.
  • (11) These preliminary results are compared with those available in the relatively meagre literature.
  • (12) For the 600 hostages snacking on biscuits and chocolate, there is no sleep, no beds, no hot food, no hot drinks, no toilet paper, no washing facilities, a meagre supply of medicines - and, apparently, a deepening bond between the hostage takers and their victims.
  • (13) BBC1's National Lottery Draws followed Robin Hood with a meagre 1.6 million viewers and a 7% share over 10 minutes from 8.10pm.
  • (14) It may seem curmudgeonly to sprinkle our meagre daily measure of praise upon the negation of something: the fact that a plan is not going ahead.
  • (15) Whatever meagre income they earn can be the difference between going hungry and not, between surviving and not.
  • (16) Oxford’s Stranded Assets Programme report concluded that “divestment outflows, even when relatively meagre in the first wave of divestment, can significantly and permanently depress stock price of a target firm if they trigger a change in market norms”.
  • (17) His scholarship, no doubt, was meagre but he could read Greek with the help of a dictionary and a crib and he loved it - that may astonish.
  • (18) The ministry figures show exports to all regions falling, apart from a meagre 0.4% year-on-year gain in shipments to North America.
  • (19) The decision by the Equalities Commission to challenge the party's racist membership rules occupied too much of his attention, and drained the party's meagre resources.
  • (20) While the disease is age-related, more common in married than in single men and family-orientated, knowledge of specific aetiological factors is meagre.