scarce
Americanadjective
-
insufficient to satisfy the need or demand; not abundant.
Meat and butter were scarce during the war.
- Synonyms:
- deficient
- Antonyms:
- abundant
-
seldom met with; rare.
a scarce book.
- Synonyms:
- infrequent, uncommon
adverb
idioms
adjective
-
rarely encountered
-
insufficient to meet the demand
-
informal to go away, esp suddenly
adverb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of scarce
First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English scars, from Old North French (e)scars, from Vulgar Latin excarpsus (unrecorded) “plucked out,” from Latin excerptus; see excerpt
Explanation
If something is scarce, there isn't much of it around. Crops are scarce after a long drought, or you might find babysitters scarce if your kids are a nightmare to watch. Scarce, meaning “restricted in quantity,” can oddly be traced back to the same Latin word that spawned the word "excerpt." Use the word scarce when you want to say that something is hard to find or practically missing. When you know you’re about to be asked to do something unpleasant, like wash the dishes or take out the trash, go ahead and “make yourself scarce,” which means to be elusive or get out of there fast.
Vocabulary lists containing scarce
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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.
See Examples For:
Thrive Eternal focuses on long-term investments in scarce cultural institutions that technology cannot replace, but it has little relevant experience in managing something as large and complicated as a World Cup.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 1, 2026
We’re quick to cut off those we disagree with, and the conditions that might allow for empathy to flourish — time, attention, presence and vulnerability — are increasingly scarce.
From Salon ● Jul. 30, 2026
Despite their name, however, the elements themselves are not especially scarce.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 24, 2026
And they allocated barely any land for commercial purposes, resulting in scarce shopping options.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 23, 2026
The archaeological findings are both scarce and opaque.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
Drastic restrictions on cross-country travel took effect Thursday in cash-strapped Cuba, with spaces on ever scarcer trains and buses now reserved for the sick, people traveling for funerals and other emergencies.
From Barron's ● Jun. 18, 2026
The right response is more production and more productivity growth, not scarcer credit.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 6, 2026
If major food-producing regions were hit, some foods would become scarcer, driving up prices globally and potentially restricting choice, the report says.
From BBC ● Jan. 21, 2026
Housing and child care are often expensive, making large families scarcer.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 12, 2025
We have manioc and yams to fill our bellies, but protein is scarcer than diamonds.
From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
But periodically investors get a reminder that one of the scarcest AI resources is top talent.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 20, 2026
Hatakeyama compares this to an updated version of Liebig's famous barrel analogy, in which a plant's growth is limited by its shortest stave, representing the scarcest resource.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 11, 2025
The scarcest resource in the AI arms race is access to computing, which is why OpenAI and others are pledging to spend trillions of dollars in the coming years to make sure the capacity expands.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 19, 2025
It can also have the most significant impact on water levels, as it happens at the time of year when water is scarcest.
From BBC ● Aug. 4, 2022
This is the scarcest book in the whole Harleian collection.
From Bibliomania; or Book-Madness A Bibliographical Romance by Dibdin, Thomas Frognall
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
