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Lilliputian   /lˌɪləpjˈuʃən/   Listen
Lilliputian

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



... of man should dwell in a palace, not in a pest-house; in a human temple, velvety, lined with down, inside and out; in which there are hundreds of millions of lilliputian trappings, fittings and articles of furniture, to carry on the minute and finer functions and chemistry of the soul. The very multitude of the fine equipments that decorate the temple give it that beautiful ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest —most unadulterated, and compromising sand—in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, "sage-brush," ventures to grow. If you will take a Lilliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a dozen imitations of it with the stiffest article of telegraph wire—set them one foot apart and then try to walk through them, you'll understand (provided the floor ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... himself bound (page 10), he felt something alive moving on his body. Bending his eyes downward as much as he could he saw it was a human creature not six inches high. We are at liberty to suppose that Gulliver was a man of ordinary height, that is to say, not six feet high. If the Lilliputian was "not six inches high," what was the ratio of height between Gulliver and his miniature captors? If, then, Gulliver is twelve times the size of one of his captors, we have a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... tray, with only one cup and saucer. I declare it makes me feel quite melancholy! Then she throws up the window, lifts the cover off the tin-pail, and turns about a thimble full of milk into a lilliputian pitcher; then she nips out a bit of butter about the size of a nutmeg, and puts it on a little cup plate; and placing a small roll and a little black teapot on the table, she sits down to her solitary meal. Now she clasps her hands and bows her head—and ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern

... height of about 18 inches, and its stems, which are very slender, are bent to the earth by the mere weight of the grain. The patch of land is then either suffered to lie fallow, or is planted with yams or cassava in rotation. Experienced cultivators of this Lilliputian grain assert that manure is unnecessary, as it delights in light soils, and it is even raised on rocky situations, which are most frequent about Kissy. When cut down, it is tied up in small sheafs and placed in a dry situation within the hut; ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... any delicacy, taste, or feeling, can bear them afterwards. And are immortal works, or works which fond man thought and called immortal, thus to perish? Thus are they doomed to destruction, by a Lilliputian ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... However, all the Lilliputian craft of our brooks are not galleys; there are submarines, which, in excellence of action and control, put to shame all human efforts along the same line. These are the water boatmen, stout boat-shaped insects ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... the challenge, and, being determined to persevere in his fun to the end, appeared on the battle ground armed only with a squirt. This raised a laugh, of course, but it did not tend much to cool the injured Lilliputian's anger. He sternly insisted on another meeting, and with real weapons. Crofts had expected to have turned off the whole affair in a joke, but he found this could not be done; and public opinion among the courtiers around him compelled him finally ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott

... must have been a tailor!—Charge, my fine fellows, and throw the constables out of the window, and the stewards after them. Every man his bird; and here goes for my Cock Robin." With that he made a grab at his Lilliputian antagonist, but missed him, as he slid away amongst the women like an eel, while his pursuer, brandishing his wooden arm on high, to which I now perceived, for the first time, that there was a large steel hook ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... itself upon the antiquity, beauty, and energy of its own tongue, with an avowed contempt for that of its neighbor; yet our emperor, standing upon the advantage he had got by the seizure of their fleet, obliged them to deliver their credentials, and make their speech in the Lilliputian tongue. ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift

... feel that perhaps I ought at least to risk even my life in order to do something here, in this country. But what is one man's life in the face of this sea of blunders? What is even a giant's effort, against the Lilliputian swarm of modern men who are determined to gain ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... 'The Fancy,' who are technically called flat-catchers, and who picked up a very pretty living by a quick hand, a rattling tongue, a deal board, three thimbles, and a pepper-corn. The game they played with these three curious articles is a sort of Lilliputian game at cups and balls; and the beauty of it lies in dexterously seeming to place the pepper-corn under one particular thimble, getting a green to bet that it was there, and then winning his money by showing that it is not. Every operator at this game was attended by certain of his friends ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... was a subsequent proprietor. Dugdale supposes the village took its name from a castle, once on the premises; and that the castle-hill yet remains: but this hill is too small, even to admit a shelter for a Lilliputian, and is evidently an artificial trifle, designed for a monument. It might hold, for its ancient furniture, a turret, termed a castle—perhaps it held nothing in Dugdale's time: the modern is a gladiator, in the attitude of ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton

... to vases. They should, for the most part, be simple in design and uniform in tint. Avoid 'fishy' mouths, too wide for their (the vases') hight. Never put Lilliputian flowers, in no matter how large a quantity, into Brobdignagian vessels. In other respects, endeavor to adapt your boxes to the character of your flowers. For dahlias, flat dishes will be found very convenient, spread ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... bright and charming "pictures." North of Waldorf is Pelham, consisting of 1,200 acres, one of the largest fruit farms in the world. Passing Esopus Island, which seems like a great stranded and petrified whale, along whose sides often cluster Lilliputian-like canoeists, we see Brown's Dock on the west bank at the mouth of Black Creek, which rises eight miles from Newburgh on the eastern slope of the Plaaterkill Mountains. Flowing through Black Pond, ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... me this literary attempt is quite indifferent—a Lilliputian affair. In comparing my work with other work of the same kind, I find a sort of relative satisfaction; but I see the intrinsic futility of it, and the insignificance of its success or failure. I do not believe in the public; I do not believe in my own work; I have no ambition, properly ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... thick foliage produced a deep, dark density, mysterious and sweet. The grand terraces about the castle were still, save for the buzz of summer insects and the low, sleepy twittering of birds. There was not a star to be seen and only the glow-worm lent an occasional lilliputian effulgence to the great, dark world. All within the castle appeared to have retired earlier than usual; perhaps for the purpose of an earlier awakening, as their Graces of Ellswold were to set out early on ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... of pasteboard—into which the lenses were ingeniously fitted. A rough telescope-stand, of common deal, stood on the ledge of the roof, from which the field of view must have been satisfactory enough to the young astronomer. Other fragments of skilful handiwork, chiefly meant for machinery on a Lilliputian scale, were strewn about the floor; and on a chair, just as he had left it that morning, stood a loom, very small in size, but perfect in its neat workmanship, with a few threads already woven, making some fabric not so very ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... that I had ever seen in the North except the oleander. Even that had wholly changed its habits and appearance, and resembled the pot-grown plant of Northern households only as the gigantic sequoia of California resembles the stunted Lilliputian pine of the Siberian tundra. The Key West oleander is not a plant, nor a shrub; it is a tree. In the yard of a private house on Carolina Street I saw an oleander nearly thirty feet in height, whose branches shaded an area ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... pygmy, gnome, manikin, dandiprat, Lilliputian, elf, midget, runt, Tom Thumb, pigwidgeon, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming



Words linked to "Lilliputian" :   Lilliput, small, piddling, small person, unimportant, fictional character, character, colloquialism, fictitious character



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