indigence
Usage
What are other ways to say indigence?
Indigence denotes a severely impoverished condition marked by hardship and the lack of any of life’s comforts: reduced to a life of indigence. Destitution, a somewhat literary word, implies a state of having absolutely none of the necessities of life: widespread destitution in countries at war. Poverty denotes serious lack of the means for proper existence: living in a state of extreme poverty.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
They had fled violence, indigence and threats to their lives, and undertaken perilous journeys through the desert.
From Washington Post
A child who knows that indigence will be compensated for at a parent’s death has less incentive to avoid that state.
From New York Times
They “punctured,” he said, Life magazine’s “conception of indigence as an abstract lure to an ideological foe” — Communism.
From Washington Post
If the prototypical American was white and middle class, and my parents’ Chinese accents and indigence marked them as irredeemably fresh off the boat, what chance was there for someone like me to achieve Americanness?
From The New Yorker
What has gone wrong in Mexico, Cuba, Central America, Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia, Arana sadly concludes, is “what always went wrong: the dictators, the rapine, the seemingly insurmountable indigence, corruption, inefficiency. It’s just our nature.”
From Washington Post
From Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.
