(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.
Scarce
Definition:
(superl.) Not plentiful or abundant; in small quantity in proportion to the demand; not easily to be procured; rare; uncommon.
(superl.) Scantily supplied (with); deficient (in); -- with of.
(superl.) Sparing; frugal; parsimonious; stingy.
(adv.) Alt. of Scarcely
Example Sentences:
(1) During capillary growth when endothelial cells (EC) undergo extensive proliferation and migration and pericytes are scarce, hyaluronic acid (HA) levels are elevated.
(2) However, H2-blocking agents, such as cimetidine and ranitidine, given either intravenously or intraspinally had a scarcely measurable effect on the spinal reflex.
(3) But even before the reforms, half of the women coming to refuges were being turned away, so beds were already scarce.
(4) Three motives are found for evaluating the quality of human life: allocation of scarce medical resources, facilitating clinical decision making, and assisting patients towards autonomous decision making.
(5) The glory lay in the defiance, although the outcome of the tie scarcely looks promising for Arsenal when the return at Camp Nou next Tuesday is borne in mind.
(6) A fat emulsion when injected into tissue is scarcely taken up by the blood vascular system but is retained within the tissue over a relatively extended period, and is distributed slowly into the surrounding tissues and to the regional lymph nodes.
(7) To date, these new and interesting capabilities have scarcely been exploited.
(8) Casadevall said the pressures to commit fraud came from many sources - not least the competition for scarce funding for research.
(9) 1: Good news It's been a scarce commodity throughout the Osborne chancellorship, but he will have a decent amount of it to dish round the chamber – notably lower inflation and higher growth than was being forecast a short while ago.
(10) Necrotic cells were infiltrated with numerous red blood cells and scarce inflammatory cells.
(11) Lactate strongly inhibited glucose oxidation through the pyruvate dehydrogenase-catalyzed reaction and the tricarboxylic acid cycle while scarcely affecting glucose utilization by the pentose phosphate pathway.
(12) Scarce economic resources make cost-benefit assessment of employee training programs an important issue.
(13) Virtually, all unsuccessful cases of mycoses treated with some of the recently exploited antifungal drugs, albeit scarce to date, would obviously be attributable to the occurrence of secondary resistance.
(14) In the strictly anaerobic acetoin-utilizing bacteria P. carbinolicus, Pelobacter venetianus, Pelobacter acetylenicus, Pelobacter propionicus, Acetobacterium carbinolicum, and Clostridium magnum, the enzymes Ao:DCPIP OR, DHLTA, and DHLDH were induced during growth on acetoin, whereas they were absent or scarcely present in cells grown on a nonacetoinogenic substrate.
(15) The situation is more challenging for developing countries, which must add new priorities to the scarce resources of their health and social programs when they still have to deal with the problems of their younger population.
(16) It should be noted nevertheless that the Casale Hospital supplies a scarcely industrialized urban area, and a wide rural environment, so that resident population might be included within one of the groups partially protected by environmental and alimentary conritions against the disease.
(17) Though large numbers of young people can be an economic advantage, a combination of unfulfilled aspirations, scarce land and water, overcrowding in growing cities as well as inadequate infrastructure could lead to social tensions and political instability.
(18) Probably as a result of the failure of down-regulation, the prominent inhibition of sterol synthesis from acetate and 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase observed in CHO cells is scarcely detectable in Monr-31 cells.
(19) The practice, and training programme for radiology in West Africa should reflect the scarce human and natural resources of West Africa, as well as the peculiar problems of the region, within the context of the acceptable pattern of health care delivery.
(20) The New Economics Foundation guessed that it could be anywhere between 3.4 and 8.3p ; 8.3 pence was so far beyond what anyone else forecast that I treated it as scarcely credible.