Impecunious

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˌɪm.pəˈkjuː.ni.əs/

Definitions

1. Lacking sufficient money to pay debts or meet basic financial needs
2. Having little or no money and experiencing financial hardship or poverty
3. Characterized by a shortage of funds and inability to afford necessary expenses

Etymology: Behind a word for being short of money stands a herd of cattle. The remote root is Latin "pecus", cattle or a herd, though the English word itself has only ever meant having little money. In early Italy, as in much of the ancient world, a family's wealth walked about on four legs. From "pecus" came "pecunia", which meant property and then money in general, long after most Romans had stopped counting their fortunes in livestock. The Romans remembered the connection, though Pliny the Elder told a tidier version: he claimed the word came from the images of cattle stamped on Rome's earliest bronze money, supposedly first issued by King Servius Tullius. The real link is simpler and older. Wealth was cattle before it was coin, and the vocabulary followed the herds. The same ancient root appears in Old English "feoh", which meant livestock, property and money all at once, a word related to English "fee", and in German "Vieh", cattle. Latin added "-osus", "full of", to make "pecuniosus", well supplied with money. English took this over from Latin as "pecunious", meaning wealthy, by the late fourteenth century. Then, in the 1590s, English speakers attached the negative prefix "im-" to it, and impecunious was born: not rich, short of cash. The two words did not fare equally. "Pecunious" has all but disappeared, while its negative has thrived, especially as a dry, mock-dignified way to admit to poverty. An impecunious poet sounds far more respectable than a broke one. So English kept the word for lacking money and lost the word for having it, and the cows that started it all have been forgotten entirely.

Synonyms: poor, indigent, needy

Antonyms: wealthy, affluent, prosperous