dearth🔊

A period or condition when food is rare and hence expensive; famine.

📑 Synonyms: famine shortage

(by extension) Scarcity; a lack or short supply.

📑 Synonyms: lack paucity scarcity

💬 Quotations

I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed unhappily: as of unnaturalness between the child and the parent; death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions in state, menaces and maledictions against king and nobles; needless diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know not what.

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth / Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, / Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood / Changes and off he goes!) within a rood— / Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.

Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

(obsolete) Dearness; the quality of being rare or costly.

(dated, obsolete) To cause or produce a scarcity in something.

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