How to Use penury in a Sentence

penury

noun

• English roads teemed with men turned vagrant by penury; Spain was on the cusp of war.
  — Washington Post, 30 Dec. 2021
• The worst part of a bear market, besides the fears of penury, is the uncertainty.
  — Larry Edelman, BostonGlobe.com, 24 May 2022
• By the World Bank’s estimate, some 800m people in China have escaped penury in the past four decades.
  — The Economist, 30 Dec. 2020
• The military had led the country since a 1962 coup, driving it into penury.
  — New York Times, 12 Apr. 2021
• The penury is the knock-on effect of a heat wave and resulting crop damage last year in Canada, which supplies around 80% of the mustard seeds used in France.
  — Albertina Torsoli, Fortune, 10 Aug. 2022
• This whole life flowed in happy penury, a freewheeling party that seemed never to end.
  — Leonid Bershidsky, The Atlantic, 17 Nov. 2015
• Looking at the data, two things can make the difference between comfort and penury.
  — Scott Burns, Dallas News, 14 Mar. 2023
• But within months, the Bitcoin bonanza took the nation from plenty to penury.
  — Shawn Tully, Fortune, 6 Jan. 2022
• The same was true of his odd combination of penury and generosity.
  — Aljean Harmetz, New York Times, 31 Oct. 2020
• The North is a pariah nation of people hovering often on the knife-edge of starvation or penury.
  — David A. Andelman, CNN, 22 Feb. 2022
• Will those bearing heavy economic costs see anything in return for their penury?
  — John Loftus, National Review, 5 Oct. 2020
• For some, that event cannot be anything less than Meghan’s divorce, humiliation and penury.
  — Aida Amoako, refinery29.com, 11 June 2021
• The penury of workers has led several retailers to raise wages and benefits.
  — Phil Wahba, Fortune, 14 Feb. 2018
• Shchukin’s lavish patronage of Matisse, which began in 1906, relieved the artist and his family from years of penury.
  — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 9 May 2022
• The village of Guaca was once at the center of Venezuela’s fish processing industry but is now reduced to penury by the lack of gasoline and the closure of most of its small fish-packing plants.
  — New York Times, 12 Dec. 2020
• One key finding: Most of the progress was not bought by donors, but came organically as hundreds of millions of people scrambled out of the most abject tiers of penury.
  — Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times, 18 Sep. 2017
• In the span of a single generation, hundreds of millions of people were lifted from penury to unimagined riches.
  — Marc Levinson, WSJ, 14 Oct. 2016
• Burma, once lauded for its fine schools and polyglot cosmopolitanism, sank into penury.
  — New York Times, 24 Dec. 2021
• After all, Obama is not like Harry Truman, who faced penury in retirement.
  — Dominic Tierney, The Atlantic, 9 May 2017
• No democratic government could ever plunge its people into penury and hope to stay in power.
  — The Economist, 2 Nov. 2017
• Sir John Falstaff and his scruffy hangers-on Bardolfo and Pistola have eaten and drunk themselves into penury.
  — Dallas News, 2 Aug. 2022
• The state’s penury weakens a police force already compromised by corruption.
  — The Economist, 22 Mar. 2018
• Since the landowner is more wealthy than the plaintiff, by California law the jury may automatically find the landowner at fault, and he or she is driven into penury.
  — Letters To The Editor, The Mercury News, 12 Sep. 2019
• Embrace the programs that prevented millions of people from falling into penury.
  — Melissa Gira Grant, The New Republic, 9 Aug. 2021
• The anger has spread in recent months, even in Hezbollah strongholds where many have protested electricity cuts and fuel shortages as well as the currency crash that has plunged more than half the country's 6 million people into penury.
  — Arkansas Online, 4 Sep. 2021
• Hudson at first found only penury and illness, a bearded figure in threadbare clothes, impoverished and solitary, attempting to eke out life as a writer.
  — Javier Pierini, Smithsonian, 29 May 2017
• Hudson at first found only penury and illness, a bearded figure in threadbare clothes, impoverished and solitary, attempting to eke out life as a writer.
  — Javier Pierini, Smithsonian, 2 May 2017
• It had been replaced by such as entrants as Monopoly, which rewarded winners with riches, punished losers with penury and became one of the top-selling board games in the United States during the Depression.
  — Washington Post, 17 Sep. 2021
• China’s rise from collectivized penury to the world’s top trading nation has hauled hundreds of millions out of poverty while making trillions of dollars for American companies.
  — Charlie Campbell, Time, 11 Oct. 2022
• Lawrence’s visionary art expressed the large-scale, up-from-slavery yearning that took agrarian folk to the industrialized cities — from penury to working-class potential — and transformed the American North.
  — Armond White, National Review, 4 Aug. 2017

Last Updated: 22 Aug 2024