MEANING
1. Food or other essentials that keep a person or animal alive and nourished.
2. Support that helps someone maintain emotional strength, hope, or a meaningful inner life.
Use it for
describing food needed for survival; showing how a household meets basic needs; contrasting bare survival with comfort; identifying a source of nourishment or livelihoodDistinguishes the means that sustain bodily life from the support that sustains hope or inner strength. Writing functions: Survival / Emotional support.
Words that belong together
- provide sustenance
- basic sustenance
- a source of sustenance
On the page
The winter stores offered sustenance but little comfort.
Fishing supplied the family’s sustenance long after trade along the road had ceased.
During the long separation, she drew sustenance from letters she knew almost by heart.
The songs offered a kind of sustenance that the official promises could not provide.
Word forms
- Base
- sustenance
Usage notes
Normally an uncountable noun: sustenance. No ordinary plural is needed for food, means of living, or emotional support. Register: formal. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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