Pauperism (; ) is the condition of being a "pauper", i.e. receiving relief administered under the Irish and English Poor Laws. From this, pauperism can also be more generally the state of being supported at public expense, within or outside of almshouses, and still more generally, of dependence for any considerable period on charitable assistance, public or private. In this sense, pauperism is to be distinguished from general poverty or the state of being a poor, although the two concepts overlap.
Pauperism (; ) is the condition of being a "pauper", i.e. receiving relief administered under the Irish and English Poor Laws. From this, pauperism can also be more generally the state of being supported at public expense, within or outside of almshouses, and still more generally, of dependence for any considerable period on charitable assistance, public or private. In this sense, pauperism is to be distinguished from general poverty or the state of being a poor, although the two concepts overlap.
== History == Under the English Poor Laws, a person to be relieved must be a destitute person, and the moment he had been relieved he became a pauper, and as such incurred certain civil disabilities. Statistics dealing with the state of pauperism in this sense convey not the amount of destitution actually prevalent, but the particulars of people in receipt of poor law relief.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).