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Lilliputian   /lˌɪləpjˈuʃən/   Listen
Lilliputian

noun
1.
A very small person (resembling a Lilliputian).
2.
A 6-inch tall inhabitant of Lilliput in a novel by Jonathan Swift.
adjective
1.
Tiny; relating to or characteristic of the imaginary country of Lilliput.
2.
Very small.  Synonyms: bantam, diminutive, flyspeck, midget, petite, tiny.  "A lilliputian chest of drawers" , "Her petite figure" , "Tiny feet" , "The flyspeck nation of Bahrain moved toward democracy"
3.
(informal) small and of little importance.  Synonyms: fiddling, footling, little, niggling, petty, picayune, piddling, piffling, trivial.  "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"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Lilliputian" Quotes from Famous Books



... restless knots of diving, feeding, coquetting, quarreling swimmers, relieving the colorless ice with groups of jetty velvet and scoter ducks, gray and white-winged coots, crested mergansers in their gorgeous spring plumage, and fat, lazy black ducks, with Lilliputian blue and green winged teal, filling the air with the whirr of swift pinions, and the ceaseless murmur of the mating myriads, rested from their long northward journey, a host such as mortal eye hath seldom beheld, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... name has past into the words 'to pandar' and 'pandarism'. 'Rodomontade' is from Rodomont, a blustering and boasting hero of Boiardo, adopted by Ariosto; 'thrasonical', from Thraso, the braggart of the Roman comedy. Cervantes has given us 'quixotic'; Swift 'lilliputian'; to Moliere the French language owes 'tartuffe' and 'tartufferie'. 'Reynard' too, which with us is a duplicate for fox, while in the French 'renard' has quite excluded the older 'volpils', was originally not the name of a kind, but the proper name of ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... different bulk but built upon exactly the same plan and proportions, say a Brobdingnagian and a Lilliputian, and let both show their powers in the arena. Suppose the first to weigh a million times more than the second. If the giant could raise to his shoulder, some thirty-five feet from the ground, a weight twenty ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various

... down the paved slope. In gardens and enclosures, the buds were holding out a multitude of lilliputian green hands, all still closed, and the apple-trees had white roses. Spring was hastening everywhere. I came in sight of the pink house. She was alone in the road and she took all the sunshine for herself. ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... came in for the BENJAMIN'S mess of obloquy, having represented Pluto, the god of wealth, in the act of carrying off a female Proserpine, but the figures so Lilliputian, and in such a disproportionate expansion of confused sceneries, that the elopement produced but a very paltry impression. The slipshod carelessness of this painter may be realised from the fact ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey


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