What is "scanty"

Usage examples of "scanty".

We have to consider all contingencies in the employment of our scanty and overpressed air force.

Therewith he brought them into the house, and into a chamber, the plenishing whereof was both scanty and rude.

The essential features of the plan were that at a preconcerted signal we at the, second and third floors should appear at the windows with bricks and irons from the tobacco presses, which a should shower down on the guards and drive them away, while the men of the first floor would pour out, chase the guards into the board house in the basement, seize their arms, drive those away from around Libby and the other prisons, release the officers, organize into regiments and brigades, seize the armory, set fire to the public buildings and retreat from the City, by the south side of the James, where there was but a scanty force of Rebels, and more could be prevented from coming over by burning the bridges behind us.

Nothing but madness or despair could have suggested the thought of subduing, with such scanty resources, the foreign masses which occupied and surrounded Paris.

There seemed to be a scanty supply of oil provided for the locomotives, but the cars had to run with unlubricated axles, and the screaking and groaning of the grinding journals in the dry boxes was sometimes almost deafening, especially when we were going around a curve.

As a voluptuary, he savored both her scanty attire and her mounting distress at the thought of being punished, particularly the uncertainty of what form that punishment was going to take.

Researchers in the early part of this century found evidence that she had once been the most important of the Bellacoola divinities, but in recent times, information about her has become scantier, and prayers were addressed to her less and less often.

It was under the shelter of these breakwinds that the natives crouched themselves at night, and sometimes in the day, without any covering to their bodies, or any shelter from the rain, more than the scanty bark walls afforded.

The Buriats are a broad-shouldered race inclined to stoutness, with small slanting eyes, thick lips, high cheekbones, broad and flat noses and scanty beards.

Very scanty this inheritance was, so scanty that it compelled Celestina to begin a rotation around the village, where in return for shelter she filled in domestic gaps of various kinds.

But where the cryptanalyst of cipher deals with only 26 such elements, the cryptanalyst of code must keep his eye on hundreds or thousands, whose characteristics, moreover, because of their reduced frequency, are much scantier and more diffuse than the sharply defined traits of letters.

We could not but mark that many of the givers were men whose threadbare doublets and pinched faces showed that the wealth which they were dashing down so readily must have been hoarded up for such a purpose, at the cost of scanty fare and hard living.

Feeble, quick, and irregular pulse, dysuria with scanty, albuminous or bloody urine or total suppression.

Whilst the cold hand gathers its scanty fruit, Whose chillness struck a canker to its root.

Whenever a grainfield gets poor and scanty, the farmer lets it rest for a year and plants only colza on it.