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 role filled him with pride—his great fear wasn’t penury or dispossession but to be thought of as not useful.
    — Anand Gopal, The New Yorker, 11 Mar. 2024
  • The worst part of a bear market, besides the fears of penury, is the uncertainty.
    — Larry Edelman, BostonGlobe.com, 24 May 2022
  • This whole life flowed in happy penury, a freewheeling party that seemed never to end.
    — Leonid Bershidsky, The Atlantic, 17 Nov. 2015
  • Will those bearing heavy economic costs see anything in return for their penury?
    — John Loftus, National Review, 5 Oct. 2020
  • Such claims of penury, however, were difficult to square with certain facts.
    — Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker, 13 Apr. 2026
  • Looking at the data, two things can make the difference between comfort and penury.
    — Scott Burns, Dallas News, 14 Mar. 2023
  • The same was true of his odd combination of penury and generosity.
    — Aljean Harmetz, New York Times, 31 Oct. 2020
  • That would help ensure that our longer lives are not feared as a time of pain, penury or purposelessness, but as a treasured gift of years.
    — Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, Forbes, 21 Feb. 2025
  • Burma, once lauded for its fine schools and polyglot cosmopolitanism, sank into penury.
    — New York Times, 24 Dec. 2021
  • The penury of workers has led several retailers to raise wages and benefits.
    — Phil Wahba, Fortune, 14 Feb. 2018
  • But within months, the Bitcoin bonanza took the nation from plenty to penury.
    — Shawn Tully, Fortune, 6 Jan. 2022
  • For some, that event cannot be anything less than Meghan’s divorce, humiliation and penury.
    — Aida Amoako, refinery29.com, 11 June 2021
  • No democratic government could ever plunge its people into penury and hope to stay in power.
    — The Economist, 2 Nov. 2017
  • The military had led the country since a 1962 coup, driving it into penury.
    — New York Times, 12 Apr. 2021
  • In the summer of 2021 protests began over the shortages and the penuries that people had been feeling.
    — Caroline Mimbs Nyce, New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2025
  • The state’s penury weakens a police force already compromised by corruption.
    — The Economist, 22 Mar. 2018
  • 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
  • Embrace the programs that prevented millions of people from falling into penury.
    — Jacob Silverman, The New Republic, 3 Aug. 2021
  • Embrace the programs that prevented millions of people from falling into penury.
    — Melissa Gira Grant, The New Republic, 9 Aug. 2021
  • 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
  • After all, Obama is not like Harry Truman, who faced penury in retirement.
    — Dominic Tierney, The Atlantic, 9 May 2017
  • 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 exultation of homecoming that was described to me is currently matched by material penury.
    — David Miliband, Time, 9 Apr. 2026
  • 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
  • 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
  • Knowing that Jane Austen never got her own Pemberley, and seeing the penury and leaking roofs portrayed, are very different things.
    — Kim Campbell, Christian Science Monitor, 1 May 2025
  • As a result, Pinchas never passed the Russian examination, condemning his wife and children to a life of penury.
    — Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, 27 Nov. 2023
  • In June, a young Cuban reporter named Delia Proenza published an article and a video denouncing the country’s penuries.
    — Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2025
  • 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

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