Spend one's time idly or inefficiently

Usage examples of trifling.

She never tried to be witty when she said something of importance, but accompanied her words with a smile which imparted to them an appearance of trifling, and brought them within the understanding of all.

Sitting up in the simple costume of nature, we ate the remains of our supper, exchanging those thousand trifling words which love alone can understand, and we again retired to our bed, where we spent a most delightful night giving each other mutual and oft-repeated proofs of our passionate ardour.

I had never made love to her but once in a trifling sort of way, and in the presence of the old lady, but I was surprised not to see her after that for several days, and I expressed my astonishment.

What tremendous self-reliance and disdain must form the basis of a female character, which accepted misapprehension and depreciation with an indifference so genuine as to scorn even the trifling exertion of disclosing its powers.

Margo went out through the front alley to hunt for the cloaked figure that she should have realized could not be found in darkness, when she ran into an old friend - or enemy, providing how you felt about somebody who had outdrawn you in a trifling matter of one hundred thousand dollars.

When I woke up in the morning I gave her a tender salutation, and presenting her with three doubloons, which must have particularly delighted the mother, I sent her away without losing my time in promising everlasting constancy--a promise as absurd as it is trifling, and which the most virtuous man ought never to make even to the most beautiful of women.

If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from memory.

When the great emergencies of the state required his presence and attention, he was engaged in conversation with the philosopher Plotinus, wasting his time in trifling or licentious pleasures, preparing his initiation to the Grecian mysteries, or soliciting a place in the Arcopagus of Athens.

One was myself, alert for auspicious falls of the cards, yet stoical and undepressed when a deal promising to be almost too easy for interest was suddenly blocked by some trifling card.

If in each of the scenes in his pattern, considered on its own, Nabokov has tenderly preserved the independence of time even as he designs a pattern too subtle to be perceived without many replayings of the fictive past, is it not possible that an infinite care could be allowing us total freedom while weaving its own designs through our free choices, so that even the most trifling or mundane details of our lives could take on unforeseeable significance?

No less the New Englander than Adams, Dana was equally ill suited to trifling away his time.

I shall exercise my skill in dentistry for trifling rewards, and you, my young Aesculapius, will prove to others, as you have already proved to me, that the strong wrist and willing arm are not lacking among your personal endowments.

Stephen had had plenty of time to reflect upon the trifling interval between the perception of a grateful odour and active salivation and to make a variety of experiments, checked by his austerely beautiful and accurate Breguet repeater, before the door burst open and the Commodore strode in, sure-footed on the heaving deck and scattering seawater in most directions.

While it is next to impossible to raise, in old gardens, a fair turnip, free from club-foot, cabbages may be raised year after year on the same soil with impunity, or, at least, with but trifling injury from that disease.

The impulse, it was quite obvious, was prompted less by conventionality than by a knightliness of heart, and Celestina, who had never before been the recipient of such courtesies, found herself inexpressibly touched by the trifling attentions.