(superl.) Little; trifling; inconsiderable; also, inferior; subordinate; as, a petty fault; a petty prince.
Example Sentences:
(1) The only thing the media will talk about in the hours and days after the debate will be Trump’s refusal to say he will accept the results of the election, making him appear small, petty and conspiratorial.
(2) I realize it’s petty, but it’s like the Michael Bolton thing from Office Space.
(3) Winston Churchill, when he was offered the role of minister of the local government board in 1906, commented: "There is no place more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more cloaked with petty and even squalid detail, more full of hopeless and insoluble difficulties."
(4) Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.
(5) We took all the feedback from users and put pencil to paper to create our consumer 3D printer built for speed and ease of use,” said Pettis.
(6) Facebook Twitter Pinterest China dismisses Trump call with Taiwan as ‘small trick’ However, Beijing’s public response has so far been measured, with the foreign ministry lodging a “solemn representation” with Washington and the foreign minister, Wang Yi, downplaying the development as “a petty move” by Taiwan.
(7) She won’t apologize for whatever makes the New York Times treat her with middle-school levels of petty scorn .
(8) The president should have directed the Justice Department to stop taking stupid points and petty appeals.” One reason the Justice Department pursued the habeas cases so hard was its client: the Pentagon.
(9) As the locus of many migrants' investments, the village of Los Pinos has experienced a modest growth in the number of full-time jobs paying somewhat above the minimum urban wage and in a variety of petty entrepreneurial activities depending heavily on the patronage of migrant households, themselves heavily subsidized by remittances.
(10) Indeed watching the prime minister singling out unemployed youngsters for uniquely punitive measures while pretending it is for their own good, cheered on by a gang of braying chums, it looks less like the behaviour of a national statesman and more like the petty vindictiveness of a schoolyard bully.
(11) Some are retired, others straddle the uncertain worlds of petty trading, agriculture and seasonal migrant labour.
(12) Not long ago, the mecca of American tourism was populated by sex workers, transvestites, drug addicts and petty criminals, rather than middle-class tourists.
(13) All the petty differences that divide us seem to melt away.
(14) Abdeslam relied on a large network of friends and relatives that already existed for drug dealing and petty crime to keep him in hiding,” Belgium’s federal prosecutor, Frederic Van Leeuw, told Belgian public broadcaster RTBF.
(15) Another said: "The problem with PMQs isn't so much that it's shouty but that the so-called pinnacle of political debate in this country is two men trading petty insults and making nasty jokes about the other while the rest of parliament boos and cheers behind them.
(16) They included a former monk, two young men with learning disabilities, a handful of petty criminals and a teacher at a private school in Paris who was "disappeared" by another republican group, the INLA.
(17) The study was conducted in the three contiguous counties of Johnson, Lafayette and Pettis in west central Missouri.
(18) Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot, said that walking on the Moon gives you an instant global consciousness, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it, that international politics look so petty.
(19) It also found that some children were put into care without lawful basis, including for petty theft and for being rude.
(20) Parents are required to bring up children responsibly, while living in a form of servitude to licensed employers and petty line managers, often themselves at risk of returning to zero-hours.
Trivial
Definition:
(n.) One of the three liberal arts forming the trivium.
(a.) Found anywhere; common.
(a.) Ordinary; commonplace; trifling; vulgar.
(a.) Of little worth or importance; inconsiderable; trifling; petty; paltry; as, a trivial subject or affair.
(a.) Of or pertaining to the trivium.
Example Sentences:
(1) The case of a 32-year-old man who suffered a blow to his left supraorbital region and eyebrow in an automatic closing door is reported to draw attention to the uncommon but trivial nature of this injury which may result in profound visual loss.
(2) Governmental regulations, requirements, and standards have improved the quality of many laboratories' work, but also result in greatly increased costs, excesses of often trivial procedures, and diversion of trained manpower from clinical service to regulatory procedures, with a resulting increase in manpower needs.
(3) Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter.
(4) While they might technically have been denied a majority in that scenario, making up the two missing seats would have been trivial.
(5) We have shown that patients with chronic airflow obstruction (CAO) complain of disabling dyspnea when performing seemingly trivial tasks with unsupported arms.
(6) Given the documented sensitivity of chest radiography in this respect, we conclude that any increase in extravascular lung water during exercise must be trivial.
(7) schizophrenia), the underestimation of prevalence by the proband method may be non-trivial.
(8) They range from relatively trivial conditions such as oral and genital thrush to fatal, systemic superinfections in patients who are already seriously ill with other diseases.
(9) Snoring usually is trivial and unimportant, but it can turn into a social or medical problem.
(10) To the sensitization and the sensitine production the following type strains (Trudeau Institute Saranac Lake) were used: M. avium, M. borstelense, M.chelonei, M. flavescens, M. fortuitum, M. gastri, M. gordonae, M.kansaii, M. marinum, M nonchromogenicum, M. phlei, M. scrofulaceum, M. smegmatis, M. terrae, M. triviale and M. bovis strain Vallee as well as M. intracellulare serotyp Davis ATCC 23435.
(11) Cardiovascular sequelae were generally trivial at all doses.
(12) Previous studies have indicated that suppression is mediated by "null cells" similar to natural suppressor (NS) cells (1), and have ruled out several possible trivial explanations for the suppressive effect.
(13) Since the biosynthetic route is similar to that of lipoxin A4 and lipoxin B4, we suggest the trivial names lipoxin C4, D4 and E4.
(14) This polysaccharide has been given the trivial name marginalan.
(15) Rupture of the bridging veins or the intratumoral abnormal vessels due to twisting of the brain from trivial head trauma or without trauma might produce subdural hematoma.
(16) Five patients had normal intracardiac hemodynamic values, 2 had trivial atrioventricular valve regurgitation and 1 patient had trivial pulmonary ventricular outflow tract obstruction.
(17) Six weeks later, two weeks after a trivial trauma with hyperextension of the shoulder joint, it was found that the catheter had broken and its tip portion had embolized into the pulmonary artery: it was retrieved without difficulty via the femoral vein.
(18) The results indicate that dichromatic and trichromatic monkeys differ only trivially on tests where performance is based on the contributions of non-opponent mechanisms, that the contribution of spectrally opponent mechanisms to the "brightness signal" is very similar in trichromatic and dichromatic monkeys, and that in increment-threshold discriminations where there are both chromaticity and luminance cues some test wavelengths yield superior performance for trichromats while others appear to favor the dichromat.
(19) Thus, the same tribunal that regularly consigns ordinary, powerless Americans to prison for decades for even trivial offenses yet again acts to protect the most powerful actors from any consequences for serious crimes: that is the US justice system in a nutshell.
(20) The appetite was selective as shown by the fact that when, after depletion, 0.34 M-CaCl2 was offered (which is equiosmotic to 3% NaCl) pigeons took just a trivial amount of it.