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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



... body, he 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 appended, exclaimed in a ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... he wandered. Literature is not less a conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the least striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strain of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language. Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist, as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson


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


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