The phrase "a penury" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a state of extreme poverty or lack of resources.
Example: "After losing his job, he found himself in a penury that he had never experienced before."
Alternatives: "a state of destitution" or "extreme poverty".
When John Tauranac heard that the W and Z subway lines were about to fade into a penury-induced sunset, his heart sank.
He describes Raymond Carver as managing to carve from a "near wreck of a life" — penury, heavy drinking, illness — "stories of exquisite directness, polish and calm that sit in the mind like perfect porcelain teacups," though they often depict lives "beneath the threshold of any aspiration higher than day-to-day survival".
As a result, he sank into a querulous penury, which his wife's withdrawn and sombre religiosity did nothing to mitigate.
His great grandfather was the glorious King Jaja, who escaped a life of penury as a slave in rural 19th-century Nigeria to become a great leader, only for the British to capture and imprison him.
Most important, beneath his uninviting veneer, something about Mr Brown himself is different.He may not be charming, but at least he seems to mean it when he talks about the state's role as a bulwark against penury during a recession, and when he denounces "laissez-faire dogma".
But that same year, during a period of particular penury, a chance encounter at his local library with several books on shrooms changed the course of his life forever.
She was only a couple of years shy of 60 when she began to write, after a near-lifetime that began in a degree of privilege and descended into a maelstrom of penury, marriage to a shiftless alcoholic, the struggle to support her family and a series of erratic house moves.
Israel imposed a strict blockade on the narrow Gaza Strip, reducing the population of a million and a half people to a state of penury.
Implying a situation of penury and hence the lack of a bed.
Elsewhere in this book he describes a moment of penury in 1964 when he assembled a catalog of literary ephemera, including two packets of the pubic hair from famous poets — O'Hara, LeRoi Jones, Edwin Denby, Ted Berrigan and others — harvested by Ginsberg and donated to Mr. Sanders as a favor.
Millions of people have seen living standards decline; thousands entered a new life of penury and an entire generation had their future made harder.
