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:

     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.

Derived terms

• piddlingly

Verb

piddling

1. present participle and gerund of piddle