puny
Americanadjective
-
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:
At the top, Whittaker wrote later, he felt frail and puny.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 15, 2026
But unlike that Oscar winner, “Two Prosecutors” has a man of conscience at its center — a confident crusader who becomes increasingly puny in the face of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 26, 2026
More often, he is a reckoning, reminding us of how puny we are in nature’s schemes.
From Salon ● Mar. 20, 2026
Some senior Labour figures fret privately that their talk of "missions" and a "Plan for Change" might seem puny to many in comparison with the scale of that challenge.
From BBC ● Mar. 13, 2025
He was a puny boy, and in his first years in Torrance, his lungs were still compromised enough from the pneumonia that in picnic footraces, every girl in town could dust him.
From "Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand
As if being punier is not bad enough, the sharks also become inferior hunters.
From Salon ● Jul. 21, 2024
But day by day, throughout the study’s 70 days, the inactive controls grew less fit and punier.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 30, 2022
The founder’s grandson Kim Jong-un is a punier figure, politically speaking.
From The Guardian ● Jul. 3, 2015
In 2003, an anthropologist at Northwestern University named William Leonard published a study arguing that the price we paid for a bigger brain may have been punier muscles.
From Scientific American ● Feb. 21, 2012
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
He was the puniest, lankest, and leanest of any we had seen on the hacienda, and his single garment was the dirtiest.
From Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Vol. I. by Stephens, John L.
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.
