paltry

Graduates will enter an economy struggling with weak consumer demand, where year-on-year retail sales contracted for the first time in three years in May, and revenue in the catering sector rose a paltry 0.6 percent.

From Barron's ● Jul. 2, 2026

Phil Taylor, director of the charity Open Seas, described the fine as "paltry".

From BBC ● Jun. 8, 2026

But no candidate ever had much more than a paltry 20% support; for all the heavy breathing, the race was always pretty much a multi-candidate tie.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 3, 2026

Net foreign direct investment in the fiscal year that ended March 31 was a paltry $7.7 billion, down from $28 billion three years earlier.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 3, 2026

How paltry and mean my actions sounded, even to myself.

From "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier

So far, milder summer temperatures have spared him from the prospect of even paltrier yields.

From Washington Times ● Aug. 2, 2014

It is a triumph over cowardice, baseness, the love of ease and safety, all the paltrier aspects of our nature; but a triumph over death it is not.

From God and Mr. Wells A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' by Archer, William

Ah! what a contrast there is between the languid way in which Christian men pursue what the Bible designates their 'calling' and that in which men with far paltrier aims pursue theirs!

From Expositions of Holy Scripture Second Corinthians, Galatians, and Philippians Chapters I to End. Colossians, Thessalonians, and First Timothy. by Maclaren, Alexander

If one of the meanest of human conditions is conscious heroism, paltrier yet is heroism before the fact, incapable of self realization!

From The Marquis of Lossie by MacDonald, George

He must maintain appearances in keeping with his associations—or drop downscale to meaner opportunities and paltrier prizes.

From The Law of Hemlock Mountain by Lundsford, Hugh

This not only explains why Jupiter only has the paltriest of rings at present; it suggests that it likely never had large rings.

From Salon ● Jul. 22, 2022

Meanwhile, the true laborers of the book industry — those who hustle and work the angles, who take the greatest risks and reap the paltriest rewards — will barely get any bookseller facetime at all.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 4, 2020

The spring snowpack is the paltriest ever measured — by April it contained just 5% of a normal year’s water — and by the end of August the major reservoirs held 59% of their historical average.

From Nature ● Sep. 29, 2015

My whole life was lighted up by love, the whole of it, down to the paltriest details, like a dark, deserted room when a light has been brought into it.

From The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories by Garnett, Constance

I struggled through the "Eikon Basilike" yesterday; one of the paltriest pieces of vapid, shovel-hatted, clear-starched, immaculate falsity and cant I have ever read.

From Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles by Various