scarce

(skârs)

adj. scarc·er, scarc·est

1. Insufficient to meet a demand or requirement; short in supply: Fresh vegetables were scarce during the drought.

2. Hard to find; absent or rare: Steel pennies are scarce now except in coin shops.

adv.

Barely or hardly; scarcely.

Idiom:

make (oneself) scarce Informal

1. To stay away; be absent or elusive.

2. To depart, especially quickly or furtively; abscond.

[Middle English scars, from Old French scars, from Vulgar Latin *excarpsus, narrow, cramped, from past participle of *excarpere, to pluck out, alteration of Latin excerpere, to pick out; see excerpt.]

scarce′ness n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

scarceness - a small and inadequate amount

scarcity

inadequacy, deficiency, insufficiency - lack of an adequate quantity or number; "the inadequacy of unemployment benefits"

paucity, dearth - an insufficient quantity or number

infrequency, rareness, rarity - noteworthy scarcity

scarceness

noun

The condition or fact of being deficient:

defect, deficiency, deficit, inadequacy, insufficiency, lack, paucity, poverty, scantiness, scantness, scarcity, shortage, shortcoming, shortfall, underage.

Translations

penuria scarsità

scarceness

, scarcity

n (= shortage) → Knappheit f; (= rarity) → Seltenheit f; because of the scarcity of talent among the singers/pupils → weil so wenige Sänger/Schüler wirklich begabt sind; his pictures are expensive because of their scarceness → seine Bilder sind teuer, weil es so wenige davon gibt; a scarcity of qualified people → ein Mangel m → an qualifizierten Kräften; in times of scarcity → in schlechten Zeiten; there are many scarcities in wartime → in Kriegszeiten ist vieles knapp

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

But she was taken away seven years ago, and I have no other kindred that I know of, besides my Aunt Poyser, who is very good to me, and would have me come and live in this country, which to be sure is a good land, wherein they eat bread without scarceness. But I'm not free to leave Snowfield, where I was first planted, and have grown deep into it, like the small grass on the hill- top."

View in context

The scarceness of impaired transactions in 2019 supports the idea that private and greenfield investments have an easier path.

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Overall in Pakistan, the condition of special persons is not upright, due to lack of knowledge, scarceness and falsehoods.

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The worldwide bouncy panorama based on fossil fuels is characterized by continuous headway of energy demand, causing scarceness of resources, nationwide sanctuary issues and the typical weather allegations due to the persistent combustion of the vestige fuels [1].

Jatropha curcas L.: A Non-food Oil Source for Optimized Biodiesel Production

On the jobs front, newspapers reinforced awareness of the scarceness of job opportunities for veterans.

Corporate Treatment of Veterans as an ESG Factor and a Potential Source of Incremental Returns

Possible future work in this area of interest can focus on three aspects: optimizing performance of existing techniques, the scarceness of publicly available software applications that can perform color transformations for dichromats, as well as development of a procedure suitable for naturalness-preserving processing of video content.

IMAGE RECOLORING FOR COLOR-DEFICIENT VIEWERS

Whiles, it credits Ghana as an independent judiciary, it noted that scarceness of resources compromises and delays the judicial process, and poorly paid judges may be tempted by bribes.

Sub-Saharan Africa has no 'free' economies -American Think Tank

Also, its value as an exotica, and its scarceness, confers on it an important ideological meaning that must be taken into consideration (Van de Noort, 2012: 71-73).

Los objetos de adorno en marfil deproboscideos del hipogeo de Padru Jossu (Sanluri, Cerdena, Italia) y el Campaniforme mediterraneo

(74) Because of the scarceness of arbitration proceedings, it is difficult to ensure that consumer financial service providers are maintaining ethical business practices.

Populist Conundrum: Big Banks or Plaintiffs' Bar? Banks Win as Congress Overrides the CFPB Rule Banning Class Action Waivers in Arbitration Agreements

The upper approximation model is based on the idea that the comparison matrix is imperfect because of its scarceness. The given comparison matrix is a part of a decision-maker's thinking so that the weight vector needs to cover it.

Two Approximation Models of Fuzzy Weight Vector from a Comparison Matrix