Word Watch

Paucity

Barely there

AI image created by Craiyon.com using the prompt “paucity,” because I was too tired to be creative

I have a paucity of ideas for this opening paragraph. It’s 11:20 pm and I’ve been up since about 7:00 am. I guess you could say I have a paucity of mental energy at the moment.

Word: paucity

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: PAW-sih-tee, /ˈpɔ·sɪ·t̬i/

Origin: Latin, old French

Meaning: scarcity; small quantity

Used in a sentence: There was a paucity of feasible solutions to solve the issue.

The Google “people also ask” questions are amusing sometimes, but I learned something new with this one: “What is the adjective form of paucity?” That’s a great question! I might have guessed something like “paucitious” but according to Wiktionary, it’s “pauce.” [1]

There’s no paucity of questions to ask about this word, that’s for sure.

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Footnote

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pauce#:~:text=English-,Adjective,paucity%3B%20being%20scarce%20or%20insufficient.