/skænt/
OriginAdjective and determiner from Middle English scant, from Old Norse skamt, neuter of skammr (“short”), from Proto-Germanic *skammaz (“short”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ḱem- (“mutilated, hornless”). Verb from Middle English scanten, from the adjective. Noun and adverb from Middle English scant, from the adjective.
- Not full, large, or plentiful; scarcely sufficient; scanty; meager.
“a scant allowance of provisions or water; a scant pattern of cloth for a garment”
“His sermon was scant, in all, a quarter of an hour.”
“Another major defect of the current literature dealing with the nomenclature of hybrid forms of English is the scant attention paid to the question of frequency.”
- Sparing; parsimonious; chary.
“Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence.”
- Slightly diminished; just short of the amount described.
- transitiveTo limit in amount or share; to stint.
“to scant someone in provisions; to scant ourselves in the use of necessaries”
“Scant not my cups.”
“where man hath a great living laid together and where he is scanted”
- intransitiveTo fail, or become less; to scantle.
- Very little, very few.
“After his previous escapades, Mary had scant reason to believe John.”
“(as pronoun) The failure of this project has scant to do with me.”
“The summer I answered my first personals, I was a 19-year-old dyke living alone in a three-room bachelorette pad, scant blocks from Main Street, Waltham, Massachusetts.”
- A small piece or quantity.
“A blonde appeared from the officers' room, wearing a scant of material that passed for issued undergarments.”
- uncommonScarcity; lack.
“As soon as the corpse was placed on the pile, and some prayers muttered by the attendant Bramin, fire was set to it at one of the corners, and the wood being dry, and in great quantity, it soon blazed”
“I was greatly surprised, however, in this very fertile and abundant country, to find so great a scant of provisions in the inns.”
“Even if labour were diverted to a great extent from our grand staple, the cotton manufacture, we are not prepared to admit that the country would be worse off. The worst that could happen in such a ca”
- A block of stone sawn on two sides down to the bed level.
- A sheet of stone.
- A slightly thinner measurement of a standard wood size.
- dated, not-comparable, uncommonWith difficulty; scarcely; hardly.
“[A]ske a Stoicke vvhich Philoſophy is true, he vvil preferre his ovvne. Then aske him vvhich approacheth next the truth, he vvill confeſſe the Academiques. So deale vvith the Epicure, that vvill ſcant”
“So weak that he was scant able to go down the stairs.”
Formsscanter(comparative) · scantest(superlative) · scants(present, singular, third-person) · scanting(participle, present) · scanted(participle, past) · scanted(past) · scants(plural)