DICT.TW Dictionary Taiwan

 Oat n.; pl. Oats
 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.
 2. A musical pipe made of oat straw. [Obs.]
 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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 Pov·er·ty n.
 1. The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need. “Swathed in numblest poverty.”
    The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty.   --Prov. xxiii. 21.
 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.
 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.
 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.
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