POOR PEOPLE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does poor people mean? 

• POOR PEOPLE (noun)
  The noun POOR PEOPLE has 1 sense:

1. people without possessions or wealth (considered as a group)

  Familiarity information: POOR PEOPLE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• POOR PEOPLE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

People without possessions or wealth (considered as a group)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects

Synonyms:

poor; poor people

Context example:

the urban poor need assistance

Hypernyms ("poor people" is a kind of...):

people ((plural) any group of human beings (men or women or children) collectively)

Domain usage:

plural; plural form (the form of a word that is used to denote more than one)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "poor people"):

homeless (poor people who unfortunately do not have a home to live in)

needy (needy people collectively)

Antonym:

rich people (people who have possessions and wealth (considered as a group))

 Context examples 

They were poor people and unlettered.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

"No; I should not like to belong to poor people," was my reply.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

By little and little, when I come to a new village or that, among the poor people, I found they know'd about me.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

These buckets were about the size of large thimbles, and the poor people supplied me with them as fast as they could: but the flame was so violent that they did little good.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Poor people often resort to chemicals to control mould growth in the home, but these can exacerbate respiratory diseases and are not a sustainable and safe prevention method.

(Smoother walls healthier for lungs, SciDev.Net)

We are much afraid that we must make large payment to the white man's people, and we hide our blankets, and our furs, and all our wealth, so that it will seem that we are poor people and can make only small payment.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

"But," I said, surely you are not quite correct, for you start on the assumption that all the poor people, or their spirits, will have to take their tombstones with them on the Day of Judgment.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

Why, you who live on the land know that you house your poor people in the slums of cities and loose famine and pestilence upon them, and that there still remain more poor people, dying for want of a crust of bread and a bit of meat (which is life destroyed), than you know what to do with.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

My second daughter, Augusta, went with her mama to visit the school, and on her return she exclaimed: 'Oh, dear papa, how quiet and plain all the girls at Lowood look, with their hair combed behind their ears, and their long pinafores, and those little holland pockets outside their frocks—they are almost like poor people's children! and,' said she, 'they looked at my dress and mama's, as if they had never seen a silk gown before.'

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)