Scarcity

How to spell scarcity

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce scarcity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scarcity mean?

1. nounA situation in which something is in short supply or hard to obtain relative to demand.

Scarcity in a sentence

• The drought caused a serious scarcity of clean water across the region.

• Economics often begins by examining the scarcity of resources against unlimited wants.

Where does scarcity come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back through Old French escarsete, meaning 'a shortage' or 'meanness', which was built on the adjective escars, 'scanty' or 'sparing'. That adjective is thought to descend from an unrecorded Vulgar Latin form excarpsus, a past participle of excerpere, literally 'to pick out' or 'to pluck away', from ex 'out' and carpere 'to pluck'. The underlying idea was of something thinned out, with too little left behind. English borrowed it in the 1300s, first as 'scarce' and soon after as the noun 'scarcity' for the condition of being in short supply. The same carpere root that gives us 'excerpt' and 'carpet' is the quiet ancestor here, and the tricky middle of the word, the unstressed -ci- spelled with a soft c, is what most often trips writers up.

How the word is built

• scarce (from Latin via Old French: insufficient, sparing)
• -ity (noun suffix forming a quality or state)