Dictionary

poverty-ridden en · ADJ

Etymology

From poverty + ridden.

Meanings

1. (of a community, place, usually) Filled with or plagued by poverty.
   • 1963, John F. Kennedy, Speech given at the University of San José, Costa Rica, 20 March, 1963, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1964, p. 272, One program after another brought an end to tenant farming in the United States, electrified nearly every farm in our country, transformed the poverty ridden Tennessee Valley into one of the richest agricultural and industrial areas in the United States.
   • Fresh from the poverty-ridden hillsides of Connaught, these rich grazing-lands, comfortable houses, magnificent demesnes and castles, are unspeakably grateful to the eye and healing to the spirit. 1901, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Penelope’s Irish Experiences, Part 5, Chapter 26:
2. (of a person) Suffering from poverty.
   • […] a young girl is sent to prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose for telling poverty-ridden slum-women how to keep from becoming pregnant! 1917, Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion […] :
   • I was a poverty-ridden student striving for life in a system which makes the very existence of a scholar precarious. 1933 January, Robert E. Howard, “The Cairn on the Headland”, in Strange Tales, volume 3, number 1:
3. (of a time) During which one suffers or has suffered from poverty.
   • The White House would be the culmination of a quest for power that contrasts with the powerlessness of his poverty-ridden early years and the helplessness that followed the war wound. 1987 November 8, Martin Tolchin, Jeff Gerth, “The Contradictions of Bob Dole”, in New York Times:
   • 1915, Cecily Sidgwick (as “Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick”), Mr. Broom and His Brother, London: Chapman & Hall, Chapter 7, p. 33, Friends soon tell each other their troubles, and she found that Carry’s haunting fear was of a poverty-ridden old age.

Forms

Synonyms

poverty-stricken (suffering from poverty) · poor (suffering from poverty)