PAUPER

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does pauper mean? 

• PAUPER (noun)
  The noun PAUPER has 1 sense:

1. a person who is very poor

  Familiarity information: PAUPER used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PAUPER (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A person who is very poor

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Hypernyms ("pauper" is a kind of...):

have-not; poor person (a person with few or no possessions)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "pauper"):

beggar; mendicant (a pauper who lives by begging)

derelict (a person without a home, job, or property)

starveling (someone who is starving (or being starved))

Derivation:

pauperize (reduce to beggary)

 Context examples 

I would as soon have been charged with a pauper brat out of a workhouse: but he was weak, naturally weak.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

“His human fictions, as you choose to call them, make for nobility and manhood. You have no fictions, no dreams, no ideals. You are a pauper.”

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

I said aside, to Traddles, that I wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest, working community; of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined half so well.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The last squire dragged out his existence there, living the horrible life of an aristocratic pauper; but his only son, my stepfather, seeing that he must adapt himself to the new conditions, obtained an advance from a relative, which enabled him to take a medical degree and went out to Calcutta, where, by his professional skill and his force of character, he established a large practice.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

A pauper himself, a slave to the money-lender, he knew himself the superior of those he met at the Morses'; and, when his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he moved among them a lord of life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin to what a prince would suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

The furniture of the room was old-fashioned and dusty; and the green baize on the top of the writing-table had lost all its colour, and was as withered and pale as an old pauper.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

And far better that crows and ravens—if any ravens there be in these regions—should pick my flesh from my bones, than that they should be prisoned in a workhouse coffin and moulder in a pauper's grave.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Some attempts had been made, I noticed, to infuse new blood into this dwindling frame, by repairing the costly old wood-work here and there with common deal; but it was like the marriage of a reduced old noble to a plebeian pauper, and each party to the ill-assorted union shrunk away from the other.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)