Word of the Day: DEARTH
A scantness or sparsity
dearth (noun) - a scarcity, shortage, or lack [durth]
BREAKDOWN: DEAR- (precious, valuable) + -TH (state or quality)
“Too many people are hungry not because there is dearth of food. It is because there is dearth of love and care in human hearts.” —Jaggi Vasudev
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Wow. I had no idea this was related to ‘dear’.
Does that mean I need to pronounce it ‘deerth’?
The DEAR- root here is doing something sneaky. If something is precious (dear), then scarcity drives up its value — so "dearth" captures both the lack AND the implied worth of what's missing. It's not just "there's less of it" but "there's less of something that matters."
The Vasudev quote lands differently with that etymology in mind. A dearth of love isn't just absence — it's the absence of something precious. The word carries the weight of what's missing.