puny

Within five years, the firm was looking after $165 billion compared with the puny $20 billion that its departing investors had left behind them on the way out the door at the bubble-market highs.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 9, 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

The park is a puny nine square miles and offered P-22 no mating opportunities.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 22, 2024

Sometimes they went below the surface and came up again, but mostly they waited for him in his puny tender.

From "Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy" by Gary D. Schmidt

Others proposed that the dots represented constellations of a much punier scale: molecules, perhaps the biosignatures of the foreign home world.

From Scientific American ● Aug. 3, 2023

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

Hulk recently smashed Twitter, or at least his punier human half Mark Ruffalo did.

From The Guardian ● Jul. 18, 2014

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

He was the puniest baby, Mrs. Weymore, you ever looked at—nobody thought he would live.

From Sir Noel's Heir A Novel by May Agnes Fleming