puny

But unlike that Oscar winner, “Two Prosecutors” has a man of conscience at its center — a confident crusader who becomes increasingly puny in the face of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 26, 2026

More often, he is a reckoning, reminding us of how puny we are in nature’s schemes.

From Salon ● Mar. 20, 2026

Sticking with puny but potent items: Lego unveiled its Smart Play system, which incorporates bricks stuffed with mini computers.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 11, 2026

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

It was Ruth May who hollered out in her puny little voice, “Bird heaven! He’s went to bird heaven, Mr. Fowles!”

From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver

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

The founder’s grandson Kim Jong-un is a punier figure, politically speaking.

From The Guardian ● Jul. 3, 2015

In 2003, an anthropologist at Northwestern University named William Leonard published a study arguing that the price we paid for a bigger brain may have been punier muscles.

From Scientific American ● Feb. 21, 2012

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, lankest, and leanest of any we had seen on the hacienda, and his single garment was the dirtiest.

From Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Vol. I. by John L. Stephens