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ADJECTIVE
  1. marked by poverty befitting a beggar
    a mean hut
    a beggarly existence in the slums
  2. (used of sums of money) so small in amount as to deserve contempt

How To Use beggarly In A Sentence

  • Rinaldo's men were lawless, and sometimes the supplies were not furnished in sufficient abundance, so that Rinaldo and his garrison got a bad name for taking by force what they could not obtain by gift; and we sometimes find Montalban spoken of as a nest of freebooters, and its defenders called a beggarly garrison. Legends of Charlemagne
  • In our ordinary talk and fallings out, the most opprobrious and scurrile name we can fasten upon a man, or first give, is to call him base rogue, beggarly rascal, and the like: Anatomy of Melancholy
  • Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans delirium, so as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, III footnote 1 « Unknowing
  • There is likewise a kind of beggarly princes in Europe, not able to make war by themselves, who hire out their troops to richer nations, for so much a day to each man; of which they keep three-fourths to themselves, and it is the best part of their maintenance; such are those in Germany and other northern parts of Gulliver's Travels
  • Northumberland are lusty fellows, fresh complexioned, cleanly, and well cloathed; but the labourers in Scotland are generally lank, lean, hard-featured, sallow, soiled, and shabby, and their little pinched blue caps have a beggarly effect. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
  • There are thirty years 'claims of escuage unsettled, and there is Sergeant Wilkins, the lawyer of Guildford, whom I will warrant to draw up such arrears of dues and rents and issues of hidage and fodder-corn that these folk, who are as beggarly as they are proud, will have to sell the roof-tree over them ere they can meet them. Sir Nigel
  • The poor peasants, to whom my apparent poverty and my beggarly attire gave confidence, described their distress in that country where the soil does not produce every year enough grain to pay the pax in kind.
  • The duties of this "hard-worked" functionary consist of the checking of the Parliamentary voters list of his ward, once every two years, and of acting as chief canvasser and election agent for the Ministerial candidate, who, however, is usually returned unopposed; and for these onerous duties he is rewarded by an ungrateful Government with the "beggarly" salary of �0 a year. Chapter XXIV
  • It looks like barm or yeast, but, being unfit for use, is only beggarly barm at best.
  • He uses weak and beggarly things like you and me so that the glory might redound to him alone.
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