Word.ws English Dictionary

land poor

land poor adjective: in a condition of poverty as a result of inability to meet tax payments or other financial requirements for one's land holdings.

Adjective

land poor (comparative more land poor, superlative most land poor)

  1. (US, idiomatic) In a condition of poverty as a result of inability to meet tax payments or other financial requirements for one's land holdings.
    • "I was offered a thousand acres, the other day, at twenty-five cents an acre," remarked the doctor. "The owner is so land-poor that he can't pay the taxes."1900, Charles W[addell] Chesnutt, chapter XV, in The House Behind the Cedars, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company […], →OCLC
    • [A]ll the rest of the surrounding land was owned by a Frenchman. . . . He was a land-miser. With no business capacity, old and opinionated, he was land poor, and it was an open question which would arrive first, his death or bankruptcy.1913, Jack London, chapter 18, in The Valley of the Moon

Forms of land poor

comparativemore land poor
superlativemost land poor
alternative formland-poor

Questions about land poor

What does land poor mean?
Land poor means in a condition of poverty as a result of inability to meet tax payments or other financial requirements for one's land holdings.
What part of speech is land poor?
Land poor is an adjective.

Words near land poor in the dictionary

  1. Land Park
  2. land patent
  3. land patents
  4. land pirate
  5. land pirates
  6. land poor
  7. land quillwort
  8. land rail
  9. land rails
  10. land register
  11. land registers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: land poor (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-land poor.ogg.

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