These words are used to describe people who are poor, who do not have enough money to maintain a decent standard of live, or who have lost their means of subsistence. Penniless frequently refers to someone who has undergone a sudden, calamitous loss of money and property, but who, as a result, may not actually be in real want.

• After the share-market crash, many wealthy men found themselves penniless ; His father cut John out of his will and left him penniless .

Penniless may also be applied to those who make no real penniless hangers-on in every bar; a penniless artist who devoted all his energies to his painting.

Poverty-stricken is the most comprehensive term and may be substituted for all the other words in this group. It is generally used to describe people who lack the material possessions to make life even passably comfortable, either through economic stress or because, as in the case of members of some religious orders, they have chosen a way of life in which they must forgo many necessities and all luxuries. Poverty-stricken points to a condition that is more or less hopeless and permanent, or at least tends to go on for a long period: poverty-stricken tenant farmers who never realize any cash profit from their crops. The word is used also to describe conditions and situations which exhibit or even cause poverty: a poverty-stricken country with little industry; The camps of poverty-stricken Aborigines on the outskirts of some Australian country towns.

Destitute emphasizes poverty of such severity that one is deprived of such basic necessities as food, clothing and shelter: a destitute family evicted for not paying rent; destitute , lost children wandering about in a bombed-out city.

Indigent indicates a state of less dire want than do poverty-stricken or destitute , and it is sometimes used in opposition to affluent. Indigent is applied to those suffering from a kind of "genteel" poverty in which circumstances are straitened but something of the former outward façade is preserved: The indigent old couple, who find it hard to make ends meet on a pension, keep their home neat and tidy.

A needy person is one who may be poverty-stricken , or even destitute , but the word implies an inability to maintain oneself without some help from public or private assistance: Christmas dinners at a mission for the homeless and needy ; needy children who receive free dental care at the clinic.

Necessitous is a close synonym of poverty-stricken and needy , but it now tends to sound literary and is infrequently used today.