from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- adj. Of inferior size, strength, or significance; weak: a puny physique; puny excuses.
- adj. Chiefly Southern U.S. Sickly; ill.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. A new pupil at a school etc.; a junior student.
- n. A younger person.
- n. A beginner, a novice.
- n. An inferior person; a subordinate.
- adj. Of inferior size, strength or significance.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- adj. Imperfectly developed in size or vigor; small and feeble; inferior; petty.
- n. A youth; a novice.
from The 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.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adj. inferior in strength or significance
- adj. (used especially of persons) of inferior size
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?"
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.