| / English Dictionary |
SCANTY
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
Irregular inflected forms: scantier , scantiest
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Short underpants for women or children (usually used in the plural)
Synonyms:
pantie; panty; scanty; step-in
Classified under:
Nouns denoting man-made objects
Hypernyms ("scanty" is a kind of...):
underpants (an undergarment that covers the body from the waist no further than to the thighs; usually worn next to the skin)
Domain usage:
plural; plural form (the form of a word that is used to denote more than one)
II. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Lacking in magnitude or quantity
Example:
a spare diet
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Similar:
meager; meagerly; meagre; scrimpy; stingy (deficient in amount or quality or extent)
Derivation:
scantiness (the quality of being meager)
Sense 2
Meaning:
(of clothing) revealing the body
Example:
her dress was scanty and revealing
Synonyms:
scanty; skimpy
Classified under:
Similar:
revealing (showing or making known)
Context examples:
Then the scanty supply of food was distressing: with the keen appetites of growing children, we had scarcely sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
The tumor is composed of small round cells with scanty cytoplasm arranged in a trabecular pattern, or in ill-defined nodules or in a diffuse pattern.
(Merkel cell carcinoma, NCI Thesaurus)
When they had eaten a very scanty meal they went to bed; but the fiddler called her up very early in the morning to clean the house.
(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)
At his invitation we had taken tea at the vicarage and had come to know, also, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, an independent gentleman, who increased the clergyman’s scanty resources by taking rooms in his large, straggling house.
(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
I afterwards saw five or six of different ages, the youngest not above two hundred years old, who were brought to me at several times by some of my friends; but although they were told, that I was a great traveller, and had seen all the world, they had not the least curiosity to ask me a question; only desired I would give them slumskudask, or a token of remembrance; which is a modest way of begging, to avoid the law, that strictly forbids it, because they are provided for by the public, although indeed with a very scanty allowance.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
Thirteen winters' revolving frosts had seen her opening every ball of credit which a scanty neighbourhood afforded, and thirteen springs shewn their blossoms, as she travelled up to London with her father, for a few weeks' annual enjoyment of the great world.
(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)
Save for the occasional use of cocaine, he had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting.
(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
The scanty, wet-looking grey hair, by which I remembered him, was almost gone; and the thick veins in his bald head were none the more agreeable to look at.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
I picked up my rifle and strolled in the direction of the brook, leaving my friends to lay out the scanty breakfast.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
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