BEGGARLY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Beggarly

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adverb

Beggarly adv. In an indigent, mean, or despicable manner; in the manner of a beggar.

adjective

Beggarly adj.

In the condition of, or like, a beggar; suitable for a beggar; extremely indigent; poverty-stricken; mean; poor; contemptible. "A bankrupt, beggarly fellow." "A beggarly fellowship." "Beggarly elements."

Produced or occasioned by beggary. (Obs.) "Beggarly sins, that is, those sins which idleness and beggary usually betray men to; such as lying, flattery, stealing, and dissimulation."

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Etymology of 'Beggarly'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Beggarly" Quotes from Famous Books

... circumstances, found it not very easy to put what he had to say into any words that his companion would admit. He fully intended at some future day to thrust Scott's innocence down his throat, and tell him that he was not only a thief, but a mean, lying, beggarly thief. But the present was not the time. Too much depended on his inducing Undy to act ...

— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... only something of their language, which he had studied a little somewhere, but also their history—a vague matter, as we all know—and the spirit and significance of their art and customs. He sometimes condescended to take us about with him to one or two Chinese restaurants of the most beggarly description, and—as he wished to believe, because of the romantic titillation involved—the hang-outs of crooks and thieves and disreputable Tenderloin characters generally. (Of such was the beginning of the Chinese restaurant in America.) He would ...

— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser

... poverty. Muriel and Susan had looked absolute amazement when a talkative freshman told the news as she received it from a girl who had attended the party. Mignon, however, was secretly furious at the, to her, unbelievable report that "that beggarly Stevens girl could actually sing." She had never forgiven Constance for refusing to dishonorably assist her in an algebra test, and after her unsuccessful attempt to fasten the disappearance of her bracelet upon ...

— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester

... basely mean in a public character is without precedent or pretence. Every nation on earth, whether friends or enemies, will unite in despising you. 'Tis an incendiary war upon society, which nothing can excuse or palliate,—an improvement upon beggarly villany—and shows an inbred wretchedness of heart made up between the venomous malignity of a serpent and the spiteful imbecility of an ...

— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... of the peasant knave out of Aguglione, and that other from Signa, with his eye to a bribe! Had Rome done its duty to the emperor, and so prevented the factions that have ruined us, Simifonte would have kept its beggarly upstart to itself; the Conti would have stuck to their parish of Acone, and perhaps the Buondelmonti to Valdigrieve. Crude mixtures do as much harm to the body politic as to the natural body; and size is not strength. ...

— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

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