I wouldn't mess with him—he makes bodybuilders look puny in comparison.
We laughed at their puny attempt to trick us.
Recent Examples on the WebThe winds of a Category 5 hurricane on our puny little planet can exceed 150 miles per hour.—Corinne Purtill, Los Angeles Times, 10 May 2024 Telling me to get a wheelchair is telling me to spend $60 on an EVC because there is no way that my puny little biceps that have never pushed a manual wheelchair in their life are going to be able to push it around for 12 miles a day for five days.—Jordan Greene, Peoplemag, 22 Apr. 2024 These puny human scientists and fanatics are hopping around the globe as the two eponymous monsters hop out of the Hollow Earth and form a reluctant partnership to take on some equally gigantic, humanity-threatening foes.—J. Kim Murphy, Variety, 30 Mar. 2024 By capitalizing on the shortage of vacation rentals in the early 2000s, hotel chains significantly raised the prices for their puny rooms, only to see the industry disrupted by VRBO and Airbnb.—Mikhail Papovsky, Forbes, 27 Feb. 2024 One human in a puny rental car can’t take in the scale of the global supply chain, but even this sliver of something so vast was enough to inspire awe.—Malia Wollan, New York Times, 23 Jan. 2024 As much as experts are convinced that puny plastics are all around us, few methods to date have been able to directly detect them.—Shi En Kim, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 Jan. 2024 Even our galaxy—all 100,000 light-years of it—is just far bigger than our puny human brains are capable of dealing with.
Consider this.—Paul Sutter, Ars Technica, 18 May 2023 The redwoods outside my window are perhaps 100 feet tall – puny by comparison to their northern brethren.—Discover Magazine, 6 Jan. 2024
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'puny.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
Etymology
Anglo-French puisné younger, weakly, literally, born afterward, from puis afterward + né born
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