Word.ws English Dictionary

undeserving poor

undeserving poor noun: poor people who ought to be able to provide for themselves but are too lazy to do so, and thus seen as not worthy of charity.

Noun

undeserving poor pl (plural only)

  1. (dated, plural, plural-only) Poor people who ought to be able to provide for themselves but are too lazy to do so, and thus seen as not worthy of charity.
    Antonyms:
    deserving poor

Antonyms of undeserving poor

Questions about undeserving poor

What does undeserving poor mean?
Undeserving poor means poor people who ought to be able to provide for themselves but are too lazy to do so, and thus seen as not worthy of charity.
What part of speech is undeserving poor?
Undeserving poor is a noun.

Words near undeserving poor in the dictionary

  1. undeservedness
  2. undeserver
  3. undeservers
  4. undeserves
  5. undeserving
  6. undeserving poor
  7. undeservingly
  8. undeservingness
  9. undesign
  10. undesignable
  11. undesignated

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: undeserving 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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Cite this entry: “undeserving poor.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/undeserving_poor. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.