Word.ws English Dictionary

pittances

pittances is the plural of pittance.

Meaning of pittance

Noun

pittance (plural pittances)

  1. A small allowance of food and drink; a scanty meal.
  2. A meagre allowance of money or wages.
    • In the very prime of life, Mr. Glentworth found every prospect gone; he had only a meagre pittance, compared to his former expenditure; but he had neither the habits nor the opportunity of increasing it.1838 (date written), L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter VII, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], published 1842, →OCLC, page 74
  3. A small amount.
    • The former residents of Fraguas, who sold up for a pittance, have swung behind the resettlement, happy to see life return to the narrow lanes where they grew up.2022 September 24, Sam Jones, “Ill-fated Spanish village poised to be destroyed a third time”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Questions about pittances

What is pittances the plural of?
Pittances is the plural of pittance.

Words near pittances in the dictionary

  1. pittance
  2. pittance payment
  3. pittance payments
  4. pittancer
  5. pittancers
  6. pittances
  7. pittara
  8. pittarah
  9. pittarahs
  10. pittaras
  11. Pittard

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pittances (page history and authors); pittance (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: “pittances.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pittances. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.