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puny

[pyoo-nee] / ˈpju ni /


Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

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But unlike that Oscar winner, “Two Prosecutors” has a man of conscience at its center — a confident crusader who becomes increasingly puny in the face of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 26, 2026

Sticking with puny but potent items: Lego unveiled its Smart Play system, which incorporates bricks stuffed with mini computers.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 11, 2026

Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject: something that so massively occupies space and time that our puny primate brains have trouble fathoming them.

From Salon ● Dec. 31, 2025

Some senior Labour figures fret privately that their talk of "missions" and a "Plan for Change" might seem puny to many in comparison with the scale of that challenge.

From BBC ● Mar. 13, 2025

“Who do you think she’s going to believe, lizard? A puny little nothing of a student or a teacher?”

From "Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody" by Patrick Ness

But day by day, throughout the study’s 70 days, the inactive controls grew less fit and punier.

From Washington Post ● Nov. 30, 2022

And since, as mentioned before, those set pieces are nothing but CGI-fests, it means that we're shortchanging on the heart of the movie to move to muscle that is much punier than the filmmakers realize.

From Salon ● Apr. 12, 2019

The founder’s grandson Kim Jong-un is a punier figure, politically speaking.

From The Guardian ● Jul. 3, 2015

In 2003, an anthropologist at Northwestern University named William Leonard published a study arguing that the price we paid for a bigger brain may have been punier muscles.

From Scientific American ● Feb. 21, 2012

He could see them in their leather flight jackets, their dark mantles, having just come down from doing things that smaller, punier men could never do, doing things that only gods could do.

From "The Great Santini" by Pat Conroy

But I am often the puniest person in the room, and it’s getting worse.

From Washington Post ● Feb. 11, 2020

It pleases me, though, when I’m in Tucson to drive up Broadway and park the rental just to conduct my insignificant banking in a building that seems to frame and elevate the puniest of transactions.

From New York Times ● Jun. 12, 2015

During the 2011-12 regular season, teams committed 19.6 fouls per game, the puniest amount in NBA history.

From Slate ● Jun. 6, 2012

The confluence of balmy temperatures and boring pictures led to the puniest Memorial Day box-office total since 2001, and, as the stats-mashers at Hollywood.com note, the fewest tickets sold since 1993.

From Time ● May 31, 2010

I have given to his own emotion the puniest name I could find for it; I have no nobler name for his intellect. 

From Hearts of Controversy by Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell




Vocabulary lists containing puny


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