Noun

(en-noun)

The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need.

* {{quote-magazine, title=Towards the end of poverty

, date=2013-06-01, volume=407, issue=8838, page=11, magazine=(The Economist) citation , passage=America’s poverty' line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the '''poverty''' barrier. But '''poverty'''’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 (the average of the 15 poorest countries’ own ' poverty lines, measured in 2005 dollars and adjusted for differences in purchasing power): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.}}

Any deficiency of elements or resources that are needed or desired, or that constitute richness; as, poverty of soil; poverty of the blood; poverty of ideas.

Noun

(uncountable) Inadequacy or incompleteness.

* {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), title=(The China Governess)

, chapter=17 citation , passage=The face which emerged was not reassuring. […]. He was not a mongol but there was a deficiency of a sort there, and it was not made more pretty by a latter-day hair cut which involved eccentrically long elf-locks and oiled black curls.}}

(countable) An insufficiency, especially of something essential to health.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-31, volume=408, issue=8851, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Promotion and self-promotion , passage=One of academia’s deficiencies is that, though its lecture halls and graduate schools are replete with women, its higher echelons are not. Often, this is seen as a phenomenon specific to the sciences. … In fact, the disparity applies to the whole grove. Another report from 2006, by the American Association of University Professors, found the same ratio in the faculties of arts, humanities and social science, too.}}

(geometry) The amount by which the number of double points on a curve is short of the maximum for curves of the same degree.

(geometry) The codimension of a linear system in the corresponding complete linear system.