Beggar

How to spell beggar

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce beggar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does beggar mean?

1. nounA person who lives by asking others for money, food, or charity.
2. verbTo reduce someone to poverty, or to exhaust or defeat something such as belief or description.

Beggar in a sentence

• noun

  A beggar sat outside the station asking passers-by for spare change.

• verb

  The scale of the fraud seemed to beggar belief among the investigators.

• noun

  The charity was set up to find shelter for every beggar on the city streets.

• verb

  Reckless spending can quickly beggar even a wealthy household.

Where does beggar come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word grew out of the Middle English verb beggen, meaning 'to ask for charity or alms', which is itself of uncertain origin; one likely source is the Old English bedecian, 'to beg'. To this verb English added an agent ending to name the person who begs, but instead of the usual -er it settled on the less common spelling -ar, which is exactly what makes the word a trap today. Scholars have long suspected an influence from Old French begart (the Beghards, members of a medieval lay religious brotherhood known for living on alms), and that French connection may help explain why the -ar ending stuck rather than -er. By the late 1200s the noun was well established in English for a person living by begging, and from the 1500s it also worked as a verb meaning 'to reduce someone to poverty'. The same root survives in the everyday verb 'beg', so remembering that beggar simply adds -gar to beg can fix the doubled g and the unusual ending in the memory.

How the word is built

• beg (to ask for alms)
• -ar (agent suffix, here in its rarer -ar rather than -er form)