pauperize

English

Alternative forms

• pauperise

Etymology

From pauper +‎ -ize.

Verb

pauperize (third-person singular simple present pauperizes, present participle pauperizing, simple past and past participle pauperized)

1. To make someone a pauper; to impoverish.
   • 1851, Philomathos, “Ought Government to Provide a Secular Education For the People?”, in The British Controversialist: And Literary Magazine, number 13, page 351:

     This is an Education which consists in the outleading of the blackguardizing, pauperizing, vagrant-like, and theftuous elements of the mentality, entirely withdrawn, and apart from any moral guidance, any elevating tendency, any ameliorating influence, nay, directly under the direction of the demoralized and the abandoned.

   • 1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, pages 22–23:

     Burdocks, thistles, dwarf oaks, cottonweed, chalky holes and whitish puddles everywhere. It was all pauperized. The very bushes might have been on welfare.

Derived terms

• pauperization