(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.
Sparse
Definition:
(superl.) Thinly scattered; set or planted here and there; not being dense or close together; as, a sparse population.
(superl.) Placed irregularly and distantly; scattered; -- applied to branches, leaves, peduncles, and the like.
(v. t.) To scatter; to disperse.
Example Sentences:
(1) Homozygotes have sparse greasy fur and lower viability and fertility than normal littermates.
(2) Fifteen days after axotomy of the olfactory nerves, two stained patterns which were numerously or sparsely labelled regions were observed.
(3) The capacity (Bmax) for [3H]ketanserin binding was significantly lower (-21%; p less than 0.05) in sparse fur animals than in control animals; there was no change in affinity (KD).
(4) Sparse cell plating densities were used to minimize cell-cell contact formation and all studies were carried out in chemically defined medium that contained a saturating amount of soluble growth factors.
(5) With this modification one obtains, for sparsely ionizing radiation, a quality factor which is proportional to the dose average of lineal energy, y.
(6) Long term data on thiazide monotherapy are sparse but suggest a persistence of the lipid effect for as long as 6 years of treatment.
(7) If a sparse crowd, shivering in suddenly chill conditions out of step with the warmth Edmonton had enjoyed in previous days, did not exactly help the atmosphere, the action remained intense.
(8) We have investigated alternative ways of showing variations in child health by using different aggregations of Enumeration Districts (ED) in a small, sparsely populated rural area.
(9) The literature on the possible risk of myasthenia gravis complicating pregnancy and delivery is sparse and partly contradictory but some of the reports on the number of perinatal and neonatal deaths are alarming.
(10) Fewer, but still ample numbers, of SP-reactive axons are present also in the ventral tegmental and retrorubral areas of the midbrain tegmentum and in the ventral pallidum of the basal forebrain, but only sparse ME-reactive axons are present in these areas.
(11) Histologically, vascular lesions such as vacuolization, degeneration and desquamation of the endothelium and hyalinization and necrosis of the muscular coat predominated, whereas reparatory reactions were relatively sparse.
(12) Two principal classes of striatum long axonal neurons (sparsely ramified reticular cells and densely ramified dendritic cells) were analyzed quantitatively in four animal species: hedgehog, rabbit, dog and monkey.
(13) Instead the government insists that the sparse legislative agenda reflected a streamlining of government priorities to help it better cope with the downturn.
(14) The situation of high cell density could be mimicked by the addition of glutaraldehyde-fixed cells to sparsely seeded proliferating cells.
(15) Delta opioid labeling was sparse throughout most of the hypothalamus; however, moderate binding densities were detected in the suprachiasmatic and ventromedial nucleus.
(16) Except for sparse labeling in lamina I in some of the cases and some minor differences rostrocaudally, the spinal distribution of labeling was similar to that from the other nerves investigated.
(17) This hypothesis is supported by the observation that the single cell type which continues to express the vimentin-IFAPa-400 combination in the mature heart is the Purkinje fibres, which are also subjected to high mechanical tensions but in which myofibrils are generally sparse compared to working myocytes.
(18) Collateral coronary blood flow was fairly sparse in most cases and in 4 left ventricular dysfunction of varying degree was present.
(19) The technique of long-term, open catheterization of the spinal subarachnoid space for infusion of analgesics in patients with refractory cancer pain is sparsely reported in the literature.
(20) A sparse adrenergic innervation of the detrusor muscle was found.