Adjacent Words

picayune definitions

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WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

adj
1: (informal) small and of little importance; "a fiddling sum of money"; "a footling gesture"; "our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war"; "a little (or small) matter"; "a dispute over niggling details"; "limited to petty enterprises"; "piffling efforts"; "giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction" [syn: fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, piddling, piffling, petty, picayune, trivial]

Merriam Webster's

I. noun Etymology: Occitan picaioun, a small coin, from picaio money, from pica to jingle, of imitative origin Date: 1804 1. a. a Spanish half real piece formerly current in the South b. half dime 2. something trivial II. adjective Date: 1836 of little value ; paltry; also petty, small-minded • picayunish adjective

Oxford Reference Dictionary

n. & adj. US --n. 1 colloq. a small coin of little value, esp. a 5-cent piece. 2 an insignificant person or thing. --adj. mean; contemptible; petty. Etymology: F picaillon Piedmontese coin, cash, f. Prov. picaioun, of unkn. orig.

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Picayune Pic`a*yune", n. [From the language of the Caribs.] A small coin of the value of six and a quarter cents. See Fippenny bit. [Local, U.S.]

Moby Thesaurus

a continental, a curse, a damn, a darn, a hoot, bagatelle, bauble, bean, bibelot, bickering, bit, brass farthing, button, captious, caviling, cent, choplogic, curio, cursory, depthless, detailed, equivocatory, evasive, exact, farce, farthing, feather, few, fig, finicky, fleabite, folderol, footling, fribble, frippery, full, fussy, gaud, gewgaw, gimcrack, hair, hairsplitting, halfpenny, hedging, hill of beans, immateriality, inconsequence, inconsequent, inconsequential, inconsequentiality, inconsiderable, inconsiderableness, indifference, ineffectuality, inferiority, insignificance, insignificant, irrelevance, jerkwater, jest, joke, kickshaw, knickknack, knickknackery, little, littleness, logic-chopping, low, low priority, marginality, meager, measly, meticulous, miniature, minikin, minute, mockery, molehill, negligibility, negligible, nice, niggling, nit-picking, no great shakes, one-horse, paltering, paltry, particular, peppercorn, pettifogging, pettiness, petty, picayunish, picayunishness, piddling, piffling, pin, pinch of snuff, pinprick, pokiness, poky, precise, puniness, punk, puny, pussyfooting, quibbling, rap, red cent, row of pins, rush, secondariness, shallow, shit, short, shuffling, skin-deep, slightness, small, small-beer, small-time, smallness, snap, sneeshing, sou, special, specific, straw, superficial, tinhorn, tiny, toy, trichoschistic, trifle, trifling, trinket, trivial, triviality, tuppence, two cents, two-bit, two-by-four, twopence, unimportance, unimpressiveness, unnoteworthiness, whim-wham