PENURIOUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does penurious mean? 

• PENURIOUS (adjective)
  The adjective PENURIOUS has 2 senses:

1. not having enough money to pay for necessities

2. excessively unwilling to spend

  Familiarity information: PENURIOUS used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PENURIOUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Not having enough money to pay for necessities

Synonyms:

hard up; impecunious; in straitened circumstances; penniless; penurious; pinched

Similar:

poor (having little money or few possessions)

Derivation:

penuriousness (a state of lacking money)

penury (a state of extreme poverty or destitution)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Excessively unwilling to spend

Synonyms:

parsimonious; penurious

Context example:

lived in a most penurious manner--denying himself every indulgence

Similar:

stingy; ungenerous (unwilling to spend (money, time, resources, etc.))

Derivation:

penuriousness (a disposition to be niggardly with money)

 Context examples 

It was too far to return to dinner, and an allowance of cold meat and bread, in the same penurious proportion observed in our ordinary meals, was served round between the services.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I trust that the labour and hazard of an investigation—of which the smallest results have been slowly pieced together, in the pressure of arduous avocations, under grinding penurious apprehensions, at rise of morn, at dewy eve, in the shadows of night, under the watchful eye of one whom it were superfluous to call Demon—combined with the struggle of parental Poverty to turn it, when completed, to the right account, may be as the sprinkling of a few drops of sweet water on my funeral pyre. I ask no more.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)