Klryz
Pronunciation guide: IPA symbols, stress and word endings

Vowels

iːseeɪsite / ɛbedæcat
ɑːfatherɒhot (UK)ɔːlawʊput
uːtooʌcupɜːbirdəabout
eɪdayaɪmyɔɪboyaʊnow
əʊ / oʊgo (UK / US)ɪəneareəhairʊətour

Consonants that look unusual

θthinðthisʃsheʒmeasure
tʃchurchdʒjudgeŋsingjyes

p b t d k g f v s z h m n l r w sound as in ordinary English spelling.

Marks

  • ˈ main stress, before the stressed syllable: /ˈwɔːtə/ water · ˌ lighter (secondary) stress: /ˌʌndəˈstænd/ understand
  • ː a long vowel · (r) an r said only in accents that pronounce it (most American, Scottish, Irish)

Common word endings

  • -s / -es (plurals; he/she form of verbs): /s/ after voiceless sounds (cats), /z/ after voiced (dogs), /ɪz/ after s, z, sh, ch, j sounds (buses, watches). Spelling: -es after s, x, z, ch, sh; consonant + y → -ies (city → cities).
  • -ed (past): /t/ after voiceless sounds (walked), /d/ after voiced (played), /ɪd/ after t or d (wanted). Spelling: love → loved, stop → stopped, carry → carried.
  • -ing: make → making, run → running, see → seeing.
  • Irregular: go, went, gone · be, was, been · see, saw, seen · man → men · child → children · mouse → mice.
  • Older (King James) forms: -eth = -s (he loveth = he loves) · -est with “thou” (thou lovest) · spake = spoke.

English Dictionary · 107,383 entries · Sources & licences

scarce

UK /ˈskɛəs/ · US /ˈskɛɚs/ adjective, adverb, proper noun

Forms scarcer scarcest Scarces scarse scace

  1. adjective (chiefly of resources, such as food) Uncommon, rare; difficult to find; insufficient to meet a demand. “By the end of the 20th century elephants had become scarce even in Africa.”
  2. adjective Scantily supplied (with); deficient (in); used with of. “The project failed due to the scarce resources in the national market.”
  3. adverb (archaic, literary) Scarcely, only just.
  4. proper noun A surname.

Synonyms

geason infrequent raresome barely hardly just scarcely

Antonyms

abundant

Etymology

From Middle English scars, scarse, from Old Northern French scars, escars ("sparing, niggard, parsimonious, miserly, poor"; > French échars, Medieval Latin scarsus (“diminished, reduced”)), of uncertain origin. One theory is that it derives originally from a Late Latin *scarpsus, *excarpsus, a participle form of *excarpere (“take out”), from Latin ex- + carpere; yet the sense evolution is difficult to trace. Compare Middle Dutch schaers (“scarce”), Middle Dutch schaers (“a pair of shears, plowshare”), scheeren (“to shear”).
The standard pronunciation having the /ɛə(ɹ)/ vowel instead of expected /ɑː(ɹ)/ is due to a tendency for Old and Middle French preconsonantal /ar/ to be borrowed as Middle English /aːr/ that only survives in this word and dace in the modern standard, but is more frequent in Early Modern English and traditional dialects; compare Scots gairden (“garden”), lairge (“large”).

Webster’s 1913

  1. adjective Not plentiful or abundant; in small quantity in proportion to the demand; not easily to be procured; rare; uncommon.
  2. adjective Scantily supplied (with); deficient (in); --with of. [Obs.] "A region scarce of prey." Milton.
  3. adverb With difficulty; hardly; scantly; barely; but just.
  4. adverb Frugally; penuriously. [Obs.] haucer.

Etymology [OE. scars, OF. escars, eschars, LL. scarpsus, for L. excerptus, p. p. of excerpere to pick out, and hence to contract, to shorten; ex (see Ex-) + carpere. See Carpet, and cf. Excerp.]

Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “scarce”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details

Sanskrit

Sanskrit dictionary entries whose meaning includes “scarce” (best matches first).