piddling

English

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈpɪdəlɪŋ/
    • Audio (Southern England):(file)

Adjective

piddling (not comparable)

  1. Insignificant, negligible, paltry, trivial, useless.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:insignificant
    After all the work I'd done, he gave me a piddling amount of money.
    • 1641 May, John Milton, Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England: And the Cavses that hitherto have Hindred it. [], [London]: [] Thomas Vnderhill, →OCLC; republished in (Please provide a date or year):
      the ignoble hucksterage of piddling tithes
    • 2023 August 6, Daniel Duane, “It’s August. Californians Are Still Skiing. Don’t Ask.”, in The New York Times[1]:
      Los Angeles would still be a piddling little town in a desert if it weren’t for Sierra snowmelt and city officials crafty enough to snooker eastern California farmers out of their water rights.
    • 2025 August 30, Gillian Tett, “America's new ‘patriotic’ capitalism”, in FT Weekend, page 7:
      [] last month the Pentagon spent $400mn to take a 15 per cent stake in MP Materials, a Nevada-based group that aims to be “a fully integrated rare earths producer”. That is a piddling sum.

Verb

piddling

  1. present participle and gerund of piddle