deprivation
/dɛprɪˈveɪʃ(ə)n
/noun [mass noun]
1The damaging lack of material benefits considered to be basic necessities in a society: low wages mean that 3.75 million people suffer serious deprivation [count noun]: rural households could escape the worst deprivations of the towns...
- For eight years the accused knew hardship, but their ills largely went beyond deprivations of a material order.
- Consequently, I have the utmost respect for all those who served in the war and suffered its deprivations.
- Some may have suffered the deprivations, or fought in the Second World War.
Synonyms
poverty, impoverishment, penury, privation, hardship, destitution, need, neediness, want, distress, financial distress, indigence, pauperdom, beggary, ruin;
reduced circumstances, straitened circumstances, hand-to-mouth existence
rare pauperism, pauperization, impecuniousness, impecuniosity
1.1The lack or denial of something considered to be a necessity: sleep deprivation...
- Sleep and food deprivation, along with the forced adoption of extremely uncomfortable postures for hours on end, do the trick.
- For example, one grantee is studying how developing nerve cells in the fetal brain respond to prolonged oxygen deprivation.
- How can humans tolerate extreme oxygen deprivation at very high altitudes?
Synonyms
dispossession, withholding, withdrawal, removal, taking away, stripping, divestment, divestiture, wresting away, expropriation, seizure, confiscation, robbing, appropriation;
denial, forfeiture, loss;
absence, lack, unavailability, deficiency, dearth
1.2 archaic The action of depriving someone of office, especially an ecclesiastical office.Cornelius was put to the torture and on August 19 sentenced to deprivation of his offices and banishment....
- In 1619 he narrowly escaped deprivation of his office for not taking the sacrament in conformity to the five articles of Perth.
- The suspension of his pay and subsistence was no deprivation of his office, any more than shaking off the apples is cutting down the tree.
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'removal from office'): from medieval Latin deprivatio(n-), from the verb deprivare (see deprive).