PUNY (punier, puniest)

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

Irregular inflected forms: punier    , puniest   

 Dictionary entry overview: What does puny mean? 

• PUNY (adjective)
  The adjective PUNY has 2 senses:

1. inferior in strength or significance

2. (used especially of persons) of inferior size

  Familiarity information: PUNY used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PUNY (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Inferior in strength or significance

Context example:

puny excuses

Similar:

weak (wanting in physical strength)

Derivation:

puniness (the quality of being unimportant and petty or frivolous)

Sense 2

Meaning:

(used especially of persons) of inferior size

Synonyms:

puny; runty; shrimpy

Similar:

little; small (limited or below average in number or quantity or magnitude or extent)

Derivation:

puniness (smallness of stature)

 Context examples 

Eh? I see the fear of death in your eyes. You beat the air with your arms. You exert all your puny strength to struggle to live.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

There are ongoing mergers taking place right now, such as between the puny Sagittarius dwarf galaxy and the Milky Way.

(The Gaia Sausage: the major collision that changed the Milky Way, University of Cambridge)

She spoke of her farther as somewhat delicate and puny, but was sanguine in the hope of her being materially better for change of air.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

Then he was gone; and the door was locked outside; and I was lying, fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and raging in my puny way, upon the floor.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Poor, puny things, not fit to stir a step beyond papa's park gates: nor to go even so far without mama's permission and guardianship!

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

The puny plot of the story was so thin, however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we were groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the action to the fact, that I at last flung it across the room and gave myself up entirely to a consideration of the events of the day.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

As in his cubhood he had been made to feel his smallness and puniness on the day he first came in from the Wild to the village of Grey Beaver, so now, in his full-grown stature and pride of strength, he was made to feel small and puny.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

I struck him with my fist, on the face, as he raised his head, but it was a puny blow.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Puny and insignificant, you mean.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)