puny
Americanadjective
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of less than normal size and strength; weak.
-
unimportant; insignificant; petty or minor.
a puny excuse.
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Obsolete. puisne.
adjective
-
having a small physique or weakly constitution
-
paltry; insignificant
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of puny
First recorded in 1540–50; spelling variant of puisne
Explanation
Are your muscles looking small, weak, and totally inferior? In other words, puny? Sounds like somebody needs to eat more spinach. Tiny, shrimpy, wimpy and totally unthreatening. That's puny in a nutshell — a very small, totally lame looking nutshell. It's most often used to describe someone's inferior physique, but can also apply to anything little that's not about to get in your way. A puny mountain would be no challenge to an Olympic skier, just as a puny plate of hot dogs would be laughable to a world speed-eating champion.
Vocabulary lists containing puny
The Watsons Go to Birmingham
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List 13
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Beowulf vocabulary
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Within five years, the firm was looking after $165 billion compared with the puny $20 billion that its departing investors had left behind them on the way out the door at the bubble-market highs.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 9, 2026
Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject: something that so massively occupies space and time that our puny primate brains have trouble fathoming them.
From Salon ● Dec. 31, 2025
That's a contrast to most stadium concerts, where the message is more like: "Look upon me, puny mortals, and be astonished by my divine talents and somewhat improbable physique."
From BBC ● Sep. 12, 2025
Samuel has long been considered one of the top rushing threats among receivers, but this season he’s rushed 32 times for just 92 yards, a puny 2.9 yard average.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 11, 2024
It's so dark he has to use a cigarette lighter, and the flame is so puny, you still can't see to the bottom of the stairs.
From "Freak The Mighty" by Rodman Philbrick
As if being punier is not bad enough, the sharks also become inferior hunters.
From Salon ● Jul. 21, 2024
Others proposed that the dots represented constellations of a much punier scale: molecules, perhaps the biosignatures of the foreign home world.
From Scientific American ● Aug. 3, 2023
The founder’s grandson Kim Jong-un is a punier figure, politically speaking.
From The Guardian ● Jul. 3, 2015
Their outburst served to make the Nationals' seem even punier than it was.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 28, 2010
He could see them in their leather flight jackets, their dark mantles, having just come down from doing things that smaller, punier men could never do, doing things that only gods could do.
From "The Great Santini" by Pat Conroy
But I am often the puniest person in the room, and it’s getting worse.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 11, 2020
It pleases me, though, when I’m in Tucson to drive up Broadway and park the rental just to conduct my insignificant banking in a building that seems to frame and elevate the puniest of transactions.
From New York Times ● Jun. 12, 2015
During the 2011-12 regular season, teams committed 19.6 fouls per game, the puniest amount in NBA history.
From Slate ● Jun. 6, 2012
The confluence of balmy temperatures and boring pictures led to the puniest Memorial Day box-office total since 2001, and, as the stats-mashers at Hollywood.com note, the fewest tickets sold since 1993.
From Time ● May 31, 2010
It made him famous, so famous that for the next hundred years every little bon mot was laid at his door, metaphorically speaking, the puniest youngest brat of them being christened "Old Joe."
From The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 A Typographic Art Journal by Various
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
