drop in the bucket

Idioms  

1. A very small quantity, especially one that is too small. For example, These contributions are just a drop in the bucket; the new church wing will cost thousands more. John Wycliffe's followers used this seemingly modern phrase in their translation of the Bible (1382), and it also appears in the 1611 King James version (Isaiah 40:15): “Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance.”

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Example Sentences

But everything being done adds up to a drop in the bucket for a city with some 1,000 supermarkets in total.

From Barron's

Yes, it’s a drop in the bucket compared with Harvard’s gigantic $57 billion endowment.

From MarketWatch

But that is a drop in the bucket. xAI needs $18 billion just to buy the 300,000 microchips required to run Colossus 2, its second giant data center in Tennessee, the Journal previously reported.

From The Wall Street Journal

And yet, he added, this deal is “a drop in the bucket compared to where we need to go.”

From The Wall Street Journal

Their assets are still a drop in the bucket of the $7.4 trillion sitting in traditional money-market funds, according to the Investment Company Institute.

From Barron's

Related Words

• bit
• trivial amount