Word.ws English Dictionary

penurious

/pəˈnjʊə.ɹi.əs//pəˈnjʊɹ.i.əs/

penurious adjective: miserly; excessively cheap.

Adjective

penurious (comparative more penurious, superlative most penurious)

  1. Miserly; excessively cheap.
    • The old man died a penurious wretch; eighty-thousand dollars in the mattress and as many holes in the roof.
    Synonyms:
    as tight as Dick's hatband, cheap, cheeseparing, chintzy, close, close as wax, close-fisted, illiberal, mean, miserable
  2. Not bountiful; thin; scant.
    • The penurious stew would have been more accurately labelled broth.
  3. Impoverished; wanting for money.
    • The poor penurious horde, naught in the cooking pot and naught in the belly.
    • As the Swindon, Marlborough & Andover, conceived in 1872 and opened between the first two places in 1881 and to Andover and the L.S.W.R. in 1883, it was one of many small, ambitious and penurious Victorian lines, deeply concerned in the skulduggery characteristic of inter-railway dealings of that...1961 October, “Talking of Trains: Last of the M.S.W.J.R”, in Trains Illustrated, page 585

penurious meaning in Tamil and Malayalam

penurious in Tamil

ஏழ்மையான, வறிய

penurious in Malayalam

poverty-stricken, poor, as poor as a church mouse
നിർദ്ധന, ഗതികെട്ട, പാവപ്പെട്ട, വളരെ പാവപ്പെട്ട, അഗതി, ഏഴയായ
mean, miserly, niggardly
പിശുക്കു കാട്ടന്ന, അല്പത്വം കാട്ടുന്ന, അല്പനായ, ലുബ്ധുള്ള, പിശുക്കുള്ള, മിതംപച

Synonyms of penurious

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

10 more antonymsFewer antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of penurious

Forms of penurious

comparativemore penurious
superlativemost penurious

Origin of penurious

From Medieval Latin pēnūriōsus. See penury from Latin penuria (“want”), related to paene (“scarcely”), c. 1400. Compare French pénurie.

Words formed from penurious

Questions about penurious

What does penurious mean?
Penurious means miserly; excessively cheap.
What is penurious in Tamil?
Penurious in Tamil is ஏழ்மையான, வறிய. See Penurious meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is penurious?
Penurious is an adjective.
How do you pronounce penurious?
Penurious is pronounced /pəˈnjʊə.ɹi.əs/.

Words near penurious in the dictionary

  1. Penunuris
  2. penup
  3. penups
  4. penurie
  5. penuries
  6. penurious
  7. penuriously
  8. penuriousness
  9. penurities
  10. penurity
  11. penury

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: penurious (page history and authors); penurious (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); penurious (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-penurious.wav.

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