How to Use penurious in a Sentence

penurious

adjective
  • The penurious school system had to lay off several teachers.
  • An earnest rebuild is underway, but like all before it, the success will be in spite of penurious ownership.
    — Gabe Lacques, USA TODAY, 13 Nov. 2021
  • Even critics concede that to cast blame solely on penurious corporations is to ignore a bigger picture.
    — New York Times, 11 June 2019
  • Her father had left high school at 14 to support his penurious mother and work as a delivery boy in a cotton trading company.
    — New York Times, 20 Apr. 2022
  • When his sports career petered out, Thorpe kept hustling to make an increasingly penurious living.
    — Jim Higgins, Journal Sentinel, 4 Aug. 2022
  • Preller never stops maneuvering, and has taken full advantage of the passive and penurious franchises.
    — Nick Canepa Columnist, San Diego Union-Tribune, 27 Feb. 2021
  • The penurious nicotine levels proved frustrating and costly for South Korean vapers.
    — Andrew Jacobs, New York Times, 30 Mar. 2020
  • Beyond its penurious powertrain, the Prime's disinterested driving demeanor extends to its steering, which is light and numb.
    — Joe Lorio, Car and Driver, 8 Apr. 2022
  • The penurious Patriots pass defense has surrendered just four touchdown passes while picking off 19 passes.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 22 Nov. 2019
  • Jobs in universities, media, publishing, and think tanks offered former bohemians and penurious toilers money and social status.
    — Pankaj Mishra, The New Yorker, 19 Apr. 2021
  • Through all the muck and carnage, all the pendulum swings between penurious and privileged milieus, there is a sympathetic human protagonist whose struggle becomes our struggle.
    — Katey Rich, HWD, 26 Feb. 2017
  • The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo is so penurious that its annual health spending per person could not buy a copy of this newspaper.
    — The Economist, 9 Jan. 2020
  • Yet this old, penurious India had an asset that was essential for harmony in a nation of several hundred million people with multiple religions and languages.
    — Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 14 Aug. 2017
  • The book looks beyond Appalachia, concluding the regions in question had been exploited by single industries and white elites, paying poor wages with equally penurious working conditions.
    — Ken Silverstein, Forbes, 13 Aug. 2023
  • There’s a cast of wanderers, visionaries, and itinerants, the self-educated and self-published, a long lineage of cranks and outcasts, mostly penurious, always opinionated, stretching away into the mists of pseudohistory.
    — Hari Kunzru, Harpers Magazine, 27 Jan. 2026
  • Magical thinking, ideological gobbledegook, and penurious inhumanity.
    — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 29 Sep. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'penurious.' 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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