Crossword clues for piddling
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Piddling \Pid"dling\, a. Trifling; trivial; frivolous; paltry; -- applied to persons and things.
The ignoble hucksterage of piddling tithes.
--Milton.
Piddle \Pid"dle\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Piddled; p. pr. & vb. n. Piddling.] [Cf. dial. Sw. pittla to keep picking at, Sw. peta to pick.]
To deal in trifles; to concern one's self with trivial matters rather than with those that are important.
--Ascham.To be squeamishly nice about one's food.
--Swift.To urinate; -- child's word.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"insignificant, trifling," 1550s, past participle adjective from piddle (v.).
Wiktionary
insignificant, negligible, paltry, trivial, useless. v
(present participle of piddle English)
WordNet
adj. (informal terms) small and of little importance; "a fiddling sum of money"; "a footling gesture"; "our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war"; "a little (or small) matter"; "Mickey Mouse regulations"; "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" [syn: fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, Mickey Mouse, niggling, piffling, petty, picayune, trivial]
Usage examples of "piddling".
For a minute, with the familiar shoptalk, he almost had the vision he was back at headquarters in a real job, not this makeweight piddling business, and under KeUeher too .
Kill the Master of the Aethyr on the road just as if you were a common bandit and him some piddling merchant?
He had influential friends on the West Coast -- mostly men who'd grown tired of Broadway's petty disloyalties and piddling profits, and were looking for a new place to put their talents and their investments -- who reported to him that cinema was a grand new frontier, and that talent scouts on the West Coast were looking for faces that the camera, and the public, would love.
In Attleboro, one of them had been arrested for disturbing the peace and then had jumped his piddling bail.
The president runs the whole shtick - a million population, which is piddling by modern standards but a lot of people if you try and count heads - he runs it like a household, a family, not a nation.
They defended Doc from what could easily become a twenty-four-hour-a-day job of interviewing persons with piddling problems—.
At the same time he turns around and watches his neighbor's door kicked in by goon squads to seize piddling amounts of contraband, while his home and assets are seized without ever being charged with a crime, then given to law-enforcement agencies who divide up the bounty amongst themselves.
But my valley just had a piddling little creek, and nobody ever found gold here.
We're out in the middle of the empty Martian plain in this piddling little vehicle.
It does need a finalebut you can't beat the show I put on in the Magellanic Clouds with a piddling little fine.
Hence, unlike all your billions of underlings, no decision you make can cause a change in your status, even if it were to plunge us into a real war, rather than this piddling little disturbance with the Argaves.
Between that, piddling with eye color and ear sets, and punching up their radiation resistance, we’.
Only when you learn to deny your ego, completely, only when you learn to be amused by such piddling sentimentalities as your little sex urges--only then will you achieve the greatness which I have always expected of you.
And on that day, the boys begin assembling around seven-thirty, and after a time people stop piddling around with drafts and start lining up pitchers, and Fast Eddie gets up from his beat-up upright piano and starts pulling tables together.