deprived

1. 1
   adjective

   Lacking the money, resources, or living conditions regarded as normal in a society; poor.

   Children from deprived backgrounds often start school already behind their peers.

   The region remained economically deprived for decades after the factories closed.

   Similardisadvantaged, underprivileged, impoverished, poor, needy

   Oppositeprivileged, affluent, wealthy, prosperous

   Note

   Here the verb's object has fallen away. A deprived area or background is simply poor, with no "of" naming what was taken. Losing that complement is what makes it a true adjective, and it grades like one: more deprived, most deprived, as in Kenan Malik's 2013 line about "the three most deprived areas in Britain." Restore the "of" and you are back with the verb's participle.

2. 2
   verb

   Past participle of deprive.

   Years of conflict had deprived the city of its most basic services.

   The prisoners were deprived of sleep for several days.

   Note

   The participle does the verb's grammatical work. It builds the perfect with have (they had deprived him of it) and the passive with be, and it is spelled the same as the simple past. It keeps the verb's pattern: the person comes first, and the thing lost follows "of." It can also carry the verb's narrower senses, as with a clergyman deprived of his office.

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