Memory connection
Picture “dear Earth”
A letter begins ‘Dear Earth’ beside market stalls that hold only shadows where bread and vegetables should be.
The sound cue helps you reach the scene; the action in the scene carries you from the scene to the definition.
Use it accurately
Meaning in context
A dearth of affordable housing has pushed many workers farther from the city center.
The archive contains a dearth of records from the earliest years.
Dearth nearly always appears as a dearth of something. It emphasizes that the supply is insufficient, not necessarily completely absent.
Common patterns
- a dearth of
- relative dearth
- dearth of evidence
Go deeper
Build a more precise understanding
Where the word comes from
Dearth grew from the same Old English root as dear in its older sense of “costly.” It first referred to a scarcity of food—the kind of shortage that makes essential goods expensive.
Register and usage
This formal noun means an insufficient supply, and it most often appears in the phrase a dearth of. It emphasizes that there is too little of something needed or desirable.
Word family
- dearth (noun; no common derived forms)
References for further checking
These links provide fuller dictionary and word-history entries. MnemoWords writes its own learner explanation rather than reproducing their definitions.
Quick check
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What does a dearth of evidence mean?
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