piddling
English
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ˈpɪdəlɪŋ/
Audio (Southern England): (file)
Adjective
piddling (not comparable)
- Insignificant, negligible, paltry, trivial, useless.
- Synonyms: see Thesaurus:insignificant
- After all the work I'd done, he gave me a piddling amount of money.
- 1641 May, John Milton, Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England: And the Cavses that hitherto have Hindred it. […], [London]: […] Thomas Vnderhill, →OCLC; republished in (Please provide a date or year):
- the ignoble hucksterage of piddling tithes
- 2023 August 6, Daniel Duane, “It’s August. Californians Are Still Skiing. Don’t Ask.”, in The New York Times[1]:
- Los Angeles would still be a piddling little town in a desert if it weren’t for Sierra snowmelt and city officials crafty enough to snooker eastern California farmers out of their water rights.
- 2025 August 30, Gillian Tett, “America's new ‘patriotic’ capitalism”, in FT Weekend, page 7:
- […] last month the Pentagon spent $400mn to take a 15 per cent stake in MP Materials, a Nevada-based group that aims to be “a fully integrated rare earths producer”. That is a piddling sum.
Verb
piddling
- present participle and gerund of piddle