"pissant" meaning in English

See pissant in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

IPA: /ˈpɪsænt/ Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-pissant.wav [Southern-England] Forms: more pissant [comparative], most pissant [superlative]
Etymology: From piss + ant, because of the urine-like smell of anthills. Compare pismire. Etymology templates: {{compound|en|piss|ant}} piss + ant, {{m|en|pismire}} pismire Head templates: {{en-adj}} pissant (comparative more pissant, superlative most pissant)
  1. (sometimes vulgar) Insignificant or unimportant. Tags: sometimes, vulgar Synonyms: insignificant
    Sense id: en-pissant-en-adj-N7SfTd-Q Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 33 35 4 22 6
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: piss-ant

Noun

IPA: /ˈpɪsænt/ Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-pissant.wav [Southern-England] Forms: pissants [plural]
Etymology: From piss + ant, because of the urine-like smell of anthills. Compare pismire. Etymology templates: {{compound|en|piss|ant}} piss + ant, {{m|en|pismire}} pismire Head templates: {{en-noun}} pissant (plural pissants)
  1. (dated outside dialects) An ant. Categories (lifeform): Ants
    Sense id: en-pissant-en-noun-qWk-iIKx Disambiguation of Ants: 18 53 2 25 3 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 33 35 4 22 6
  2. (derogatory) An insignificant person. Tags: derogatory Categories (topical): People Synonyms: nobody
    Sense id: en-pissant-en-noun-pi5JTahG Disambiguation of People: 0 0 74 14 11
  3. (derogatory) A person who adheres strictly to a rule or policy despite current circumstances. Tags: derogatory
    Sense id: en-pissant-en-noun-SrSnYCLW Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 33 35 4 22 6 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 24 27 5 37 7
  4. (derogatory) A person seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but the trivial, especially in the sense of trivial or irrelevant criticism. Tags: derogatory
    Sense id: en-pissant-en-noun-ZY5274Du
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: piss-ant

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for pissant meaning in English (6.4kB)

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      "args": {
        "1": "en",
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      "expansion": "piss + ant",
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          "_dis": "33 35 4 22 6",
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          "ref": "1993, PJ O'Rourke, “Democracy in its diapers”, in Give War a Chance, Picador",
          "text": "It is the beauty of well designed fascism that it gives every piss-ant an ant hill to piss from.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2005 January 24, Seymour M. Hersh, “The Coming Wars”, in The New Yorker, archived from the original on 2015-08-25, page 24",
          "text": "“Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”",
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        "(derogatory) An insignificant person."
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          "text": "This is our chance to make a name for ourselves; to show that we're not just some piss-ant white-bread mountain town.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2003, Tony Kushner, Angels in America, spoken by Roy Cohn (Al Pacino)",
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        },
        {
          "ref": "2020, Brandon Taylor, Real Life, Daunt Books Originals, page 222",
          "text": "‘He was just this little pissant kid, Wallace.’",
          "type": "quotation"
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          "insignificant"
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        "(sometimes vulgar) Insignificant or unimportant."
      ],
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          "word": "insignificant"
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        "sometimes",
        "vulgar"
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        "An ant."
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        "(dated outside dialects) An ant."
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          "type": "quotation"
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        "An insignificant person."
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        "(derogatory) An insignificant person."
      ],
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          "ref": "1997 August 20, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, “Weight Gain 4000”, in South Park, season 1, episode 2, spoken by Mayor McDaniels",
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        "(sometimes vulgar) Insignificant or unimportant."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.