Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1910, originally theater slang for lower-salaried circuits, or ones requiring more daily performances; from noun phrase (also 1910). Compare big time.
Wiktionary
a. On a small scale.
WordNet
adj. of minor importance; "a nickel-and-dime operation run out of a single rented room"; "a small-time actor" [syn: nickel-and-dime]
Usage examples of "small-time".
The common logic regarding the Nixon assault was that U S T T 0 D U S T 171 Wyan Nixon had shorted his boss, Deene Combs, on a small-time drug deal and had been made an example by said boss, but no one was talking, including Nixon.
AIP dishonorable discharge, reckless endangerment with a spacecraft, Shepherd background, small-time morals charges, one assault, bashed some guy with a bottle.
There were dozens of characters like Koker Hosch, still in Manhattan - small-time leaders who could summon a crew if needed.
For most of those twenty years Lodestar had languished as a small-time financial advisory firm, barely generating enough fee income to stay in business.
Look at what Zull found out about Clink - a small-time racketeer, working on his own - all that sort of stuff.
I, yachtsman, charterer, small-time businessman, an escapee if you like into the lotus life of the Mediterranean, to know, or even to understand, the machinations of those far removed from the little Balearic island of Menorca?
On small worlds, small-time lawbreakers assumed an importance all out of proportion to their actual significance.
Billy Fairchild had been strictly small-time, until a man named Gabriel Horn had come on the scene about two years ago.
Light apologizes to its customers for inconveniences as a result of cowardly attacks on company installations by small-time, would-be terrorists who act in ignorance.
Search out the small-time lawyers with only twenty or thirty cases, bring them into the fold.
Security had a damn sight more on its mind than a couple of small-time malcontents and a disputed miner craft.
The common logic regarding the Nixon assault was that U S T T 0 D U S T 171 Wyan Nixon had shorted his boss, Deene Combs, on a small-time drug deal and had been made an example by said boss, but no one was talking, including Nixon.
Thaxter came to Zarathustra ten years earlier, he had tooled around with some small-time rackets, set up some crooked labor unions and a couple of marketing cooperatives to put the squeeze on planters.
A small-time Detroit bootlegger named Frank Chock signed an affidavit swearing that Buckley had set him up in the bootlegging business.
Small-time dealers never conceptualize themselves as just Small-time dealers, kind of like whores never do.