What's the difference between miser and scrimp?

Miser


Definition:

  • (n.) A wretched person; a person afflicted by any great misfortune.
  • (n.) A despicable person; a wretch.
  • (n.) A covetous, grasping, mean person; esp., one having wealth, who lives miserably for the sake of saving and increasing his hoard.
  • (n.) A kind of large earth auger.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He told strikers at St Thomas’ hospital, London: “By taking action on such a miserable morning you are sending a strong message that decent men and women in the jewel of our civilisation are not prepared to be treated as second-class citizens any more.
  • (2) "It's always been done in a really miserable way in the past, but this is fresh and new.
  • (3) Supporting a Sunderland side who had last won a home Premier League game back in January, when Stoke City were narrowly defeated, is not a pursuit for the faint-hearted but this was turning into the equivalent of the sudden dawning of a gloriously hot sunny day amid a miserable, cold, wet summer.
  • (4) People like Hugo forgot how truly miserable Paris had been for ordinary Parisians.” Out of a job and persona non grata in Paris, Haussmann spent six months in Italy to lift his spirits.
  • (5) But my characters are either really strong, miserable or tortured."
  • (6) A full marching band moved through a sea of umbrellas, playing the Les Miserables song Do You Hear the People Sing.
  • (7) Similarly at world level, it considers the struggles and efforts by the miserable and oppressed nations for achievement of their legitimate rights and independence as their due rights, because people have the right to liberate their countries from colonialism and obtain their rights.
  • (8) My first marriage is the only thing I've ever failed at and I failed miserably."
  • (9) If after 10 years the Californian law is working well: that’s to say it is not being used against the weak and miserable as a cheaper alternative to proper palliative care, there will be no reason not to extend it here.
  • (10) Low point: "When a show I directed, Paul Simon's The Capeman, failed miserably."
  • (11) The smile, so noticeably absent during a miserable final season at his boyhood club, was back.
  • (12) His father died when Giulio was two, and the family survived on his mother's miserly widow's pension.
  • (13) Roberto Firmino and Adam Lallana established a comfortable advantage for the home side, only for Adam Johnson’s free-kick, and Simon Mignolet’s weak attempt to stop it, plus Defoe’s clinical late strike to extend Liverpool’s miserable run to five points out of 18 in 2016.
  • (14) This drubbing exposed not only the team's inadequacy on the day in the face of a rampant United side who sensed miserable resistance almost from the kick-off, but also Arsène Wenger's tepid commitment to the FA Cup, whatever his ready-made complaints of depleted resources before and after.
  • (15) "He truly had such a miserable time on the first day or two of the shoot.
  • (16) Fair pay, not benefits or subsidies to miserly employers, brought Labour into being – so why is the party in danger of letting this strong emblematic policy slip away?
  • (17) On the positive side, it will very soon overtake Les Miserables (£40.8m) to become the second-biggest 2013 release, behind only Despicable Me 2 (£47.4m).
  • (18) Smoldering resentment, chronic anger, self-centeredness, vindictiveness, and a constant feeling of being abused ultimately produce a miserable human being who, as well as being alienated from self, alienates those in the interpersonal sphere.
  • (19) As soon as you live in the place, it becomes grey and miserable – as do the people.
  • (20) The good thing about the above is the equal-opportunities nature of it: almost everyone is made to feel inadequate or miserable.

Scrimp


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To make too small or short; to limit or straiten; to put on short allowance; to scant; to contract; to shorten; as, to scrimp the pattern of a coat.
  • (a.) Short; scanty; curtailed.
  • (n.) A pinching miser; a niggard.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) 5.04pm GMT Speaking of Spain, the New York Times is running a hard-hitting piece about how Spaniards are scrimping in the time of crisis.
  • (2) So we are not talking about people at the beginning of their career scrimping around, hard-up for money.
  • (3) It might mean scrimping and saving for a deposit on a house, only to see prices spin out of your orbit.
  • (4) The club scrimps on payroll (30th, 29th, 29th in the last three years) and, even in the face of sparse attendances from a disenfranchised fan base, still profits from league revenue sharing rules.
  • (5) Over the past few decades we’ve all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank.
  • (6) The Commons environmental audit committee also calls for the ringfencing of cash to preserve natural habitat (pdf) , to prevent HS2 Ltd scrimping on measures that rail engineers deem impractical.
  • (7) Soft-spoken and often seemingly ill at ease with publicity, Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe was born to an impoverished family of canoe-makers in the remote district of Otuoke who scrimped to put him through school.
  • (8) And I want to start today by saying how grateful I am to all of you, to everyone who poured your hearts and your hopes into this campaign, who drove for miles and lined the streets waving homemade signs, who scrimped and saved to raise money, who knocked on doors and made calls, who talked, sometimes argued with your friends and neighbors, who emailed and contributed online, who invested so much in our common enterprise, to the moms and dads who came to our events, who lifted their little girls and little boys on their shoulders and whispered in their ears, “See, you can be anything you want to be.” Donald Trump wins US election: Clinton says glass ceiling will be broken – live Read more To the young people, like 13-year-old Anne Riddell from Mayfield, Ohio, who had been saving for two years to go to Disney World and decided to use her savings instead to travel to Pennsylvania with her mom and volunteer there, as well.
  • (9) As for scrambling together a deposit for a first flat, some calculations suggest that young families are nowadays required to scrimp for a dozen years , others put the figure at 22 .
  • (10) It’s seductive: we all know someone who did win: the entrepreneur who struck it rich, hard-working immigrants who scrimped to put the kids through college, clawing their way to the middle class.
  • (11) No amount of scrimping on holidays or mobile phones will be enough to pay for the £100,000 needed to move up from a two-bed flat to a three-bed semi in many parts of Britain, let alone find the £500 a month that pension experts tell us we need to put aside every month to fund a decent pension in retirement.
  • (12) If these organisations want to scrimp on staff pensions it begs the question, are these the sort of organisations that we want running our welfare system, our schools and our hospitals?
  • (13) He said he had been working 90 hours a week because the governing body scrimped on staff costs in order to save up for a sports centre, including a women-only swimming pool.
  • (14) With the few dollars they scrimped from their labor, some bought tickets and boarded buses, even if they couldn't always sit where they wanted to sit.
  • (15) Where their parents might have had to scrimp for three years to get a deposit together in the 1980s, the Resolution Foundation calculates that high house prices would mean a youngster on middling pay today having to save for something like 22 years.
  • (16) The unemployed and the sick do not have the scope to muddle through by scrimping and saving as those who are lucky enough to be in work do.
  • (17) Confronted with the prospect of paying a £20-a-week bedroom tax out of a weekly income of around £110 from April, she has also opted to leave ("I'm scrimping and saving as it is," she says); she will move around 100 miles away to Weston-super-Mare on 21 March.
  • (18) Millions of families are struggling with the hidden costs of sending children to state school, with many forced to take out loans or scrimp on food and heating to pay for basics such as dinners, uniforms, course materials and trips.
  • (19) Panic about so-called “knife-edge”, “life-or-death” negotiations has become so commonplace that it is almost meaningless to a population whose major concerns are still making ends meet and scrimping for enough to eat.
  • (20) But Justin King, chief executive, said Sainsbury's had prospered, as shoppers apparently scrimped in October and November to fund a blowout in December: "Customers took the opportunity to spend a little less, week in week out, so they could buy the best for special occasions."