absence, bare cupboard, bare subsistence, beggarliness, begging, bumming, cadging, defectiveness, deficiency, deficit, deprivation, destitution, drought, empty purse, famine, grinding poverty, gripe, hand-to-mouth existence, homelessness, impecuniousness, imperfection, impoverishment, incompleteness, indigence, lack, mendicancy, mendicity, moneylessness, mooching, necessitousness, necessity, need, neediness, omission, panhandling, pauperism, pauperization, penury, pinch, privation, scrounging, shortage, shortcoming, shortfall, starvation, want, wantage