Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Plenty of working families are raising children and having fruitful social lives on median incomes or even less: Living thriftily is not the same as living penuriously or meanly.

From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 10, 2025

Generally, schools hire two kinds of adjuncts: the penuriously trapped who rely on their table-crumbs pay and those who have incomes elsewhere.

From Washington Post

As a young man he lives penuriously on what he can get by writing for the Yiddish-language newspapers.

From Time Magazine Archive

He may be allowed to remain in Ethiopia; more probably, he will be packed off to exile�perhaps to Britain, where he lived almost penuriously from 1936 to 1940 during Italy's occupation of his country.

From Time Magazine Archive

Scant′ly, not fully or sufficiently, scarcely: narrowly: penuriously: scantily.—ns.

From Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (part 4 of 4: S-Z and supplements) by Various