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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
poverty-stricken
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
poverty-stricken neighborhoods
▪ At the moment, many poverty-stricken communities are experiencing a shortage of teachers.
▪ His photographs show vividly the lives of poverty-stricken families in the Gorbals area of Glasgow.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A man was walking down a street, and the street was narrow, mean, full of poverty-stricken houses.
▪ Everything conspires, therefore, to isolate and ignore that poverty-stricken world and leave it to its own devices.
▪ Governments turn a blind eye to the thousands of poverty-stricken families that migrate to the forest every year.
▪ His security police are no strangers to intimidation when it comes to striking fear into Ciskei's 850,000 poverty-stricken people.
▪ I wandered through a poverty-stricken village in the countryside, flies swarming over me under a baking sun.
▪ The poverty-stricken could then take over the deserted metropolises.
▪ You drank because you were poverty-stricken, Mamma, both in pocket and in spirit.
Wiktionary
poverty-stricken

a. Very poor.

WordNet
poverty-stricken

adj. poor enough to need help from others [syn: destitute, impoverished, indigent, necessitous, needy]

Usage examples of "poverty-stricken".

Their very dress displayed at once their unmartial and poverty-stricken state.

Weir, in THE MENACE OF THE POLICE, cites the case of Jim Flaherty, a criminal by passion, who, instead of being saved by society, is turned into a drunkard and a recidivist, with a ruined and poverty-stricken family as the result.

From the look of her she was a townswoman, respectable and not too well-to-do, though not poverty-stricken either.

The Fronde left behind it a sense of littleness, of poverty-stricken humanity, and this particular frondeur had seen the mask drop from the features of his fellow-men.

Nobunaga had settled the situation in the capital and returned to Gifu, he turned away from the matters that had preoccupied him and found that Mikawa was no longer the weak, poverty-stricken province it had once been.

They are the products of several generations of permissive childrearing, egalitarian homes, praise for childish creativity no matter how poverty-stricken the imagination or inadequate the execution, primary and secondary education from which the concepts of discipline and content have disappeared, and personal freedom of movement and sexual activity.

General Washington Faulconer would doubtless have his wrist slapped, but colonels and captains, especially poverty-stricken colonels and captains, made far more convenient scapegoats for disasters.

The smell of cabbage soup and the good coffee even the poverty-stricken sometimes manage to get hold of hangs in the air, along with the marvellous inexpressible smell of the scarlet geraniums that explode over balconies and on walls above narrow stairways, and against a sky tangled with washing and pigeons.

Some time later, on the 10th of November to be exact, during the very early hours of the morning Cicely and I were walking along Dorset Street in Spitalfields, a dingy and poverty-stricken neighborhood.

The human galaxy teemed with such prizes, yet the Clan fleet must skulk about the outworlds, gnawing discarded scraps: border worlds, miserable settlements of poverty-stricken exile, like Bethel.

There is no honest advantageousness In dealing with such poverty-stricken curs.

Dry sand was about their feet, and under them thin wiry grass, that just managed to grow out of the poverty-stricken shore.

Security was actually heaviest along the northern fences, to keep poverty-stricken thieves from breaking into the maintenance yards and stripping them of tools, parts, and even whole vehicles for sale on the black market.

From the chatter of the maids of honour she had discovered that he was poor, that all that he possessed were a few barren acres in the north and the one thousand pounds a year which was the salary of one of Charles's Gentlemen of the Bedchamber-and which was rarely paid, the king being so poverty-stricken.

He had the look of a poverty-stricken college boy, one who waited on tables and spent his money for phonograph records instead of food.