Macer

I didn’t know that the word “meager” can mean “lean or thin”. The Cambridge Dictionary is concise and very useful for practical purposes, but sometimes it doesn’t explicitly tell us important meanings (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/meager). Anyway, this word comes from the Latin adjective “macer”, meaning “lean”.

“Meager” and “macer” might look quite different at first. The letter “c” in “macer” is pronounced as /k/ (that is close to the sound /g/), which helps us understand a bit more easily.

Another common example of this origin is “emaciated”, which contains the prefix “ex-“¹ (meaning “thoroughly”) and macer. Thus, emaciated means “excessively thin”. The verb form “emaciate” does exist in English, meaning “to make lean”, but it’s not commonly used at all.

One more word, “macilent”². This word also means “thin”, although it is rare today.