Meaning

adjective deficient in quantity or number compared with the demand

adverb only a very short time before; ; ; ; ; - W.B.Yeats

originFrom Middle English scars, scarse, from Old Northern French scars, escars ("sparing, niggard, parsimonious, miserly, poor"; > French échars, Medieval Latin scarsus (“diminished, reduced”)), of uncertain origin. One theory is that it derives originally from a Late Latin *scarpsus, *excarpsus, a participle form of *excarpere (“take out”), from Latin ex- + carpere; yet the sense evolution is…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0