meager

[mee-ger]

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adjective

deficient in quantity or quality; lacking fullness or richness; scanty; inadequate: a meager salary; meager fare; a meager harvest.
having little flesh; lean; thin: a body meager with hunger.
maigre.

Also especially British, mea·gre.

Origin of meager

1300–50; Middle English megre < Old French maigre < Latin macer lean

Related formsmea·ger·ly, adverbmea·ger·ness, noun

Synonyms for meager

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1. See scanty. 2. gaunt, spare, skinny.

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018

Related Words for meager

paltry, tenuous, scanty, minimum, sparse, miserable, scant, insufficient, mere, puny, skimpy, slim, scrimpy, bare, barren, deficient, exiguous, flimsy, infertile, insubstantial

Examples from the Web for meager

Contemporary Examples of meager

Especially in a country where the minimum wage is a meager $3.00 an hour.
House of the Witch: The Renegade Craft Brewers of Panama
Jeff Campagna
November 30, 2014
Rising to retrieve it, I offer her what meager reassurance I can muster.
The Stacks: Grateful Dead I Have Known
Ed McClanahan
August 30, 2014
He called on his parents not to accept any “meager compensation” for his death.
Medieval Cruelty in Modern Times: ISIS Thugs Behead American Journalist
Christopher Dickey
August 19, 2014
Look through that PDF I just linked to and feast on the meager amounts earmarked for democracy and assistance programs.
Is It Just Me or Is the World Exploding? So Why Isn’t Obama Doing More?
Michael Tomasky
July 28, 2014
Personal consumption expenditures—people buying stuff—grew at a meager one percent rate in the first quarter.
How Obamacare Helped Crash the Economy
Daniel Gross
June 25, 2014

Historical Examples of meager

With his meager strength he assisted, and the two managed to lower the body gently.
Way of the Lawless
Max Brand
Yet, his comment, meager as it was, stood wholly in Mary's favor.
Within the Law
Marvin Dana
They were beautiful eyes, but the rest of Rose, oh, how pinched and meager!
Gloria and Treeless Street
Annie Hamilton Donnell
It was part of my plan, this meager manning of the bandit ship.
Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930
Various
The help they offered was meager, and slow, but it sufficed.
Under Arctic Ice
H.G. Winter

Word Origin and History for meager

adj.

late 14c. (late 12c. as a surname), "lean, thin, emaciated" (of persons or animals), from Old French megre, maigre "thin" (12c.), from Latin macrum (nominative macer) "lean, thin" (source of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian magro), from PIE *makro- (see macro-). Of material things (land, food, etc.) from early 15c. Cognate Germanic words (Old Norse magr "thin," Old High German magar, German mager, Middle Dutch magher, Dutch mager, Old English mæger) come directly from the PIE root via Proto-Germanic *magras and are not from Latin.