meagre: [14] Meagre originally meant literally ‘thin’ (it goes back via Anglo-Norman megre and Old French maigre to Latin macer ‘thin’, source also of English emaciate [17]). Not until the 16th century did the modern figurative sense ‘scanty’ begin to emerge. (Its distant Indo- European ancestor, incidentally, *makró-, also produced a parallel Germanic form mager ‘thin’, shared by German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish.) => emaciate
