Beggary
adj, noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The state of a beggar; indigence, extreme poverty. countable, uncountable
"Happily some haplesse man hath conscience, And for his conscience lives in beggary."
- 2 a solicitation for money or food (especially in the street by an apparently penniless person) wordnet
- 3 The fact or action of begging. countable, uncountable
"[…] the landlady […] ushered them into a large garret where twenty or thirty people of all ages and both sexes lay and dozed away the day, choosing the evening and night for their trades of beggary, thieving, or prostitution."
- 4 the state of being a beggar or mendicant wordnet
- 5 Beggarly appearance. countable, uncountable
"[…] she looked back to the freedom and the beggary of the old studio in Soho with so much regret, that everybody, herself included, fancied she was consumed with grief for her father."
- 1 beggarly obsolete
"beggary counterfeits"
Example
More examples"Poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice."
Etymology
From beggar + -y.
More for "beggary"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.