Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Of inferior size, strength, or significance; weak: a puny physique; puny excuses.
- adj. Chiefly Southern U.S. Sickly; ill.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Later-born; younger; junior. See puisne, 1.
- Small and weak; inferior or imperfectly developed in size or strength; feeble; petty; insignificant.
- Synonyms Little, diminutive, stunted, starveling.
- n. A young, inexperienced person; a junior; a novice.
- n. A bedbug: same as punice.
Wiktionary
- n. obsolete A new pupil at a school etc.; a junior student.
- n. obsolete A younger person.
- n. obsolete A beginner, a novice.
- n. archaic An inferior person; a subordinate.
- adj. Of inferior size, strength or significance.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Imperfectly developed in size or vigor; small and feeble; inferior; petty.
- n. rare A youth; a novice.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. inferior in strength or significance
- adj. (used especially of persons) of inferior size
Etymologies
- Variant form of puisne. (Wiktionary)
- Variant of puisne. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I'll have to shoot a deer at Thanksgiving with my 338 from stem to stern to see if I can get the bullet back, and show you guys that the big X bullets are expanding, even in puny deer.”
“Jarvis Cocker: "Why do they call a puny person a weed, when weeds are tenacious plants that grow in adverse circumstances?”
The Guardian: Thin is in: in search of the perfect male body
“But ask them we must, for the human barbarian seeks explanations & meaning for what is inexplicable & unanswerable in the terms our puny brain can understand.”
“David Pogue, has been that its offerings are "puny" -- a mere 60,000 e-books so far -- compared to what's available on the Kindle or other e-readers offered by competing retailers like Barnes ”
“I also love "puny" - as in "I drank too much last night and I'm feeling kinda puny this morning.”
“The second is lovingly referred to as puny and spindly.”
“But we'd never met, nor even communicated, and I couldn't think of any reason why a blue supergiant SF star like him would be calling a puny red dwarf like me.”
“He vaguely recalled a puny little man with anxious eyes, whose clothes seemed too big for his scrawny body.”
“Actually p_eunny aka puny, Adolf Hitler started touting the same junk about national socialism in the 1920s.”
“The umpires help hitters "work the count" by calling a puny strike zone.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘puny’.
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1100
abound, technology, branch of knowled..., prognosticate, automaton, matron, an older married ..., realm, special field of ..., kingdom, annals, historical records and 981 more...
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GRE 2014
abase, abate, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abjure, abortive, abound, abrasive, abreast, abridge and 1577 more...
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
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Genes
Interesting gene names. Some of these may have changed recently (to something less offensive/funny).
http://www.genenames.org/
tinman, agnostic, dreadlocks, Van Gogh, fruitless, lava lamp, ariadne, cheap date, ken and barbie, I'm not dead yet, I'm not dead yet 2, manic fringe and 1192 more... -
Words in which "u" is pronounced "yu"
cute, uniform, puny, municipal, butte, fume, perfume, puke, cucumber, huge, demure, cube and 95 more...
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Adjectives
sagacious, average, angry, mad, crazy, giant, ugly, pretty, happy, sad, lonely, solitary and 119 more...
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Barron's 1100 words you need to know ...
rue, aegis, awesome, conflagration, congenial, debris, deplorable, detriment, dispersed, doddering, eruption, hoard and 7 more...
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Words
teeter, headlong, reprobate, canard, ersatz, prevaricate, trenchant, minatory, fatuous, stultify, vitiate, fulminate and 135 more...
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135 Offensive Shakespearean Terms
135 Offensive Shakespearean Terms =)
artless, baggage, barnacle, bawdy, beef-witted, bladder, boil-brained, bootless, brazen, cankerblossom, churlish, churrish and 123 more...
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The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
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aliko's Words
deli, turkey, bodrum, deniz, sunny, seks, tatil, hava, zeeman, captain, kapitein, kaptan and 256 more...
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Naresh_Gre
The path meanders through the vineyards
meander, labyrinth, Sinuous, gyrate, caron, awry, credo, banter, juxtaposition, argot, inexorable, foibles and 223 more...
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Vocab++
Words as I learn them.
fetid, mezzanine, hiatus, austerity, subliminal, resplendent, implacable, impugn, debase, exiguous, cirque, holster and 2538 more...
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stpeter's Words
abase, abasement, abashed, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abhorrent, abide, abject, ablation, abnegation and 3536 more...
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From Book - SAT & College Dictionary ...
ebb, exotic, immure, abeyance, panegyric, debonair, protege, dissipate, frantic, penitent, abject, edify and 871 more...
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Delicious Words
The stuff that fit its descript. so well you can almost taste it on your tongue or feel the sting against your skin.
gurgle, grubby, tangy, bolt, spring, skid, shudder, thud, thump, spit, lush, pop and 91 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for puny.
PossibleUnderscore heehee. Oct 23, 2009
hernesheir One can almost bet that Brahms penned better cello parts than Joseph Haydn did.... Oct 23, 2009
bilby "I have gone all through Brahms pretty well by now. All I can say of him is that he's a puny little dwarf with a rather narrow chest. Good Lord, if a breath from the lungs of Richard Wagner whistled about his ears, he would scarcely be able to keep his feet."
- Gustav Mahler. Oct 23, 2009