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gent; want of estate, or means of comfortable subsistence; penury; poverty; as, helpless, indigence. Cowper.

To make poor; to reduce to poverty or indigence; as, misfortune and disease impoverish families.

Indigence. New indigencies founded upon new desires. South.

The condition of being needy or necessitous; pressing need; indigence; want. Urge the necessity and state of times. Shak. The extreme poverty and necessity his majesty was in. Clarendon.

Want of the means of subsistence; poverty; indigence; destitution. Chaucer. Famine is in thy cheeks; Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes. Shak.

The state or quality of being needy; want; poverty; indigence.

Absence of resources; want; privation; indigence; extreme poverty; destitution. "A penury of military forces." Bacon. They were exposed to hardship and penury. Sprat. It arises in neither from penury of thought. Landor.

The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need. "Swathed in numblest poverty." Keble. The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty. Prov. xxiii. 21.

ep wrongfully; as, to steal the personal goods of another. Maugre thy heed, thou must for indigence Or steal, or borrow, thy dispense. Chaucer. The man who stole a goose and gave away the giblets in G. Eliot.

Poverty; indigence. [Obs.] Eikon Basilike.

Specifically, absence or lack of necessaries; destitution; poverty; penury; indigence; need. Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want. Swift.