What are the definitions of poor and poverty ? Many people hear the words poverty and have different meanings, so how do we know which definition and I poor is the correct one? According to many people poverty may mean a person who does not have any money to do the things they want to do, however most people can afford to live only on the things they truly need. This is just one example; there are many other definitions of the word poverty. Then what do people consider to be the meaning of the word poor? Some may say poor is not having enough money for that extra something at the supermarket or at the mall. What exactly are the true definitions of each word, and how do you tell the words apart and how do you know what to believe.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) the word poor means; wanting means to produce the comforts, or the necessaries of life; needy, indigent, destitute so destitute to be depended upon gifts or allowances for subsistence. These are the definitions from the (OED) a, very scholarly dictionary, how do we know that this is the correct definition of the word poor? Just because it is the definition in a book that everyone seems to trust or because there has been so much research going into that definition, it still only gives you an idea of what poor actually means. So how do we know the difference between the right definition and the wrong, or less correct definition? Is there really a true definition of the word poor perhaps there is but we don't know what the true meaning is and if we know the true meaning we may not even understand it.
As for the word poverty what does that mean? Also using the (OED) I found this definition, the condition or quality of being poor the ...
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...wn clothes, and endus up losing his life as he looses his farm. In using parts of the definitions I felt that they fit the story of the Joad family and the book The Grapes of Wrath because everyone in the story so far has been affected by what was happining and the characters of each fit well into the definitions of poor and poverty.
In conclusion of my definitions of poor and poverty is that to get the true definiton of poverty you have to think about the many other definitions and include all of them together and then decide when and how you can say that you or anyone else are actually considered to be poor or in poverty. It takes a lot of thought in thinking of what each of these words mean and many things should be taken into consideration before applying them.
Work Cited
OED: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition Oxford University Press 2002
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" Diabetes.” New York Times “. New York Times Company. 31 Aug. 2011. Web. 7 Dec. 2011.
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