How to Use dirt-poor in a Sentence

dirt-poor

adjective
  • Think of him as a dirt-poor man’s Brett Favre.
    — Vic Tafur, New York Times, 23 Jan. 2026
  • The company was born from the will of a man who grew up dirt-poor in Baltimore, flunked fifth grade, served in Vietnam and became a billionaire.
    — Edgar Thompson, The Orlando Sentinel, 24 Jan. 2026
  • But the Shoutin’, Rick Bragg’s first family memoir about growing up dirt-poor in Alabama.
    — Literary Hub, 17 Sep. 2025
  • The tough, ingenious (and dirt-poor) Houthis, protected by Yemen’s mountainous interior, fought back with the tenacity of drug-resistant microbes.
    — Seth Harp, Harpers Magazine, 19 Sep. 2025
  • Roberta Ceretto’s grandfather Riccardo moved to Alba in the 1930s from a dirt-poor village in the high Langhe and found work with a local wine producer.
    — Lee Marshall, Condé Nast Traveler, 10 Mar. 2022
  • Cut to 1981, in a dirt-poor neighbourhood of Santiago de Chile, an adolescent Carlos gets his sneakers stolen by another kid, Clavo.
    — John Hopewell, Variety, 17 Feb. 2026
  • The attention to quotidian labor in harsh conditions at times calls to mind Luchino Visconti’s classic 1948 neorealist docudrama about dirt-poor Sicilian fishermen, La Terra Trema.
    — David Rooney, HollywoodReporter, 3 Sep. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dirt-poor.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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