p 3 e 1 n 1 u 1 r 1 y 4
6 letters · 11 points in Scrabble
Meaning
noun a state of extreme poverty or destitution
originFrom Late Middle English penuri, penurie (“destitution, need, poverty; dearth, lack, scarcity”), borrowed from Latin pēnūria (“need, scarcity, want”) + Middle English -i, -ie (suffix forming abstract and collective nouns); further etymology uncertain, possibly related to paene (“almost, nearly; barely, hardly, scarcely”, adverb), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *peh₁- (“to hate; to hurt”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0