meagreness

The text gives a meagre outline of the reigns of himself and his son Ahab, of which perhaps the meagreness is the most significant feature.

Expositions of Holy Scripture Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and First Book of Samuel, Second Samuel, First Kings, and Second Kings chapters I to VII Alexander Maclaren 1868

The low altitude of the planet, however, practically neutralised this advantage for northern observers, and public expectation, which had been raised to the highest pitch by the announcements of sensation-mongers, was somewhat disappointed at the "meagreness" of the news authentically received from

A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century Fourth Edition 1874

This hotel is on a magnificent scale of height and breadth, its staircases and corridors being the most spacious I have seen; but there is a kind of meagreness in the life there, and a certain lack of heartiness, that prevented us from feeling at home.

Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1834

This hotel is on a magnificent scale of height and breadth, its staircases and corridors being the most spacious I have seen; but there is a kind of meagreness in the life there, and a certain lack of heartiness, that prevented us from feeling at home.

Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete Nathaniel Hawthorne 1834

Also, my attitude may be considered, in part, as a reaction from my childhood's meagreness and my childhood's excessive toil.

Chapter 12 2010

He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness.

Chapter 2 2010

The narrowness of the high concept is, finally, too much a sort of meagreness, and too little a scalpel edge.

Shades of Grey: Summary and book reviews of Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde. 2009

Bear in mind the routine tooth-gnashing the European Union's budgets inspire among voters in net-contributor countries, and the relative meagreness of those contributions compared with what they may be obliged to pay in a closer-knit euro zone.

EU Integration Would Come at a High Price Alen Mattich 2011

"Oh, but it was the bare, naked, pinching meagreness of it!"

ON THE MAKALOA MAT 2010

Flaubert, for example, in attempting to refine it, eventually subjects it to a near-monolithic discipline, an impoverishment of language to a finite, recurring range of devices, not unrelated perhaps to the formulaic meagreness of memoranda and scientific discourses.

Fowler attacks Flaubert in Dictionary 2008