Word.ws English Dictionary

impoverishing

impoverishing is the present participle and gerund of impoverish.

Meaning of impoverish

Verb

impoverish (third-person singular simple present impoverishes, present participle impoverishing, simple past and past participle impoverished)

  1. (transitive) To make poor.
    Antonyms:
    enrich
  2. (transitive) To weaken in quality; to deprive of some strength or richness.
    • That exuberant crop quickly impoverishes any fertile soil.
    Synonyms:
    deplete
  3. (intransitive) To become poor.

Adjective

impoverishing (comparative more impoverishing, superlative most impoverishing)

  1. (formal) Tending to impoverish (To weaken in quality; to deprive of some strength or richness); limiting.
    • It seems impoverishing to me to cite 1763 as a crucial year in terms of royal-parlementary exchanges on fiscal issues, as Doyle does, without calling attention to the fact that this is the inaugural year of liberalization; or to invoke Maynon d'Invault's desire to prolong the second twentieth tax...2015, Steven L. Kaplan, The Stakes of Regulation: Perspectives on 'Bread, Politics and Political Economy' Forty Years Later, Anthem Press, page 182
    • They accompanied the pair to their home, where there was every indication of the very impoverishing effects of a course of inebriation.1877, Jacob Samuel Vandersloot, The True Path, Or, The Murphy Movement and Gospel Temperance, L.T. Palmer, page 336

Forms of impoverishing

comparativemore impoverishing
superlativemost impoverishing

Questions about impoverishing

What does impoverishing mean?
Impoverishing means tending to impoverish (To weaken in quality; to deprive of some strength or richness); limiting.
What is impoverishing the present participle and gerund of?
Impoverishing is the present participle and gerund of impoverish.
What part of speech is impoverishing?
Impoverishing is an adjective.

Words near impoverishing in the dictionary

  1. impoverishees
  2. impoverisher
  3. impoverishers
  4. impoverishes
  5. impoverisheth
  6. impoverishing
  7. impoverishment
  8. impoverishments
  9. impoverisht
  10. impower
  11. impowered

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: impoverishing (page history and authors); impoverish (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “impoverishing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/impoverishing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.