The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Oat \Oat\ ([=o]t), n.; pl. Oats ([=o]ts). [OE. ote, ate, AS.
[=a]ta, akin to Fries. oat. Of uncertain origin.]
1. (Bot.) A well-known cereal grass (Avena sativa), and its
edible grain, used as food and fodder; -- commonly used in
the plural and in a collective sense.
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2. A musical pipe made of oat straw. [Obs.] --Milton.
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Animated oats or Animal oats (Bot.), A grass (Avena
sterilis) much like oats, but with a long spirally
twisted awn which coils and uncoils with changes of
moisture, and thus gives the grains an apparently
automatic motion.
Oat fowl (Zool.), the snow bunting; -- so called from its
feeding on oats. [Prov. Eng.]
Oat grass (Bot.), the name of several grasses more or less
resembling oats, as Danthonia spicata, Danthonia
sericea, and Arrhenatherum avenaceum, all common in
parts of the United States.
To feel one's oats,
(a) to be conceited or self-important. [Slang]
(b) to feel lively and energetic.
To sow one's wild oats, to indulge in youthful dissipation.
--Thackeray.
Wild oats (Bot.), a grass (Avena fatua) much resembling
oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of
cultivated oats.
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The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Poverty \Pov"er*ty\ (p[o^]v"[~e]r*t[y^]), n. [OE. poverte, OF.
povert['e], F. pauvret['e], fr. L. paupertas, fr. pauper
poor. See Poor.]
1. The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or
scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need.
"Swathed in numblest poverty." --Keble.
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The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty.
--Prov. xxiii.
21.
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2. Any deficiency of elements or resources that are needed or
desired, or that constitute richness; as, poverty of soil;
poverty of the blood; poverty of ideas.
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Poverty grass (Bot.), a name given to several slender
grasses (as Aristida dichotoma, and Danthonia spicata)
which often spring up on old and worn-out fields.
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Syn: Indigence; penury; beggary; need; lack; want;
scantiness; sparingness; meagerness; jejuneness.
Usage: Poverty, Indigence, Pauperism. Poverty is a
relative term; what is poverty to a monarch, would be
competence for a day laborer. Indigence implies
extreme distress, and almost absolute destitution.
Pauperism denotes entire dependence upon public
charity, and, therefore, often a hopeless and degraded
state.
[1913 Webster] Powan