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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



... of me this literary attempt is quite indifferent—a Lilliputian affair. In comparing my work with other work of the same kind, I find a sort of relative satisfaction; but I see the intrinsic futility of it, and the insignificance of its success or failure. I do not believe in ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... abstractedly what was to be done with the tense, excitable child at his side? A voice from the wings announced: "Mouse and Harebell, the Lilliputian ponies, with Infant Jockies, the smallest schooled racers in existence." And the word "schooled" recalled to him the diffident woman he had met at Stephen Jannan's, the night before. Miss ... Brundon. A place for the education of younger girls. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... Rocks, constituting a whole that is scarcely to be equalled:"—another declares that "the most lofty and magnificent fabrics of Art, compared with these stupendous works of Nature, sink in idea to Lilliputian size:"—and a third, that "the towering precipices of Scratchell's Bay are of the most elegant forms;" and "the pearly hue of the chalk is beyond description by words, probably out of the power ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon

... no ordinary emotion that Katherine Grandison heard that this perfect cousin Ferdinand had at length arrived. She had seen little of him even in his boyish days, and even then he was rather a hero in their Lilliputian circle. ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli

... and a parliamentary constitution, but not a parliamentary God and a parliamentary religion." The interval of a century has not weakened the force of the remark. It is indeed time that we should leave off these petty cavils on frivolous points, these Lilliputian sophistries, whether our "eggs are best broken at the broad or ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... was a subsequent proprietor. Dugdale supposes the village took its name from a castle, once on the premises; and that the castle-hill yet remains: but this hill is too small, even to admit a shelter for a Lilliputian, and is evidently an artificial trifle, designed for a monument. It might hold, for its ancient furniture, a turret, termed a castle—perhaps it held nothing in Dugdale's time: the modern is a gladiator, ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton

... and listened, as if in an ecstasy, to a sound which seemed to me no better than a tiny chirping from an innumerable multitude of lilliputian grasshoppers. ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott

... water not easy to describe. Words seem colorless—inadequate to convey the picture it presented or the sense of awe it inspired. Looking at it from among the boulders on the shore it seemed the last degree of madness for human beings to pit their Lilliputian strength against that racing, thundering flood. Certain it was that The Big Mallard was the supreme test of ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... and arrows, my little man?' said her ladyship to Hal, as she reviewed her Lilliputian regiment. 'You can't march, man, ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas

... that the old women of Scotland will defend the country with their distaffs, rather than that troops enough be not sent to make good so noble a pledge. Were the thousands that have mouldered away in petty conquests or Lilliputian expeditions united to those we have now in that country, what a band would Sir John Moore have under him!... Jeffrey has offered terms of pacification, engaging that no party politics should again appear in his Review. I told him I thought it was now too late, and reminded ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles

... edges of the flower faces turned to the sky, while the stems were visible down to the ground, and formed a Lilliputian forest in which it were easy to imagine tiny creatures spending days as secluded and as happy as I enjoyed in my forest of beech and birch and maple, which came down to the very back ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller

... although that establishment faces on Thirty-fourth Street. Above McCreery's, opposite the corner where the New York Club once had its home, and on property part of which was formerly the house of the Engineers Club, is Best's, once Lilliputian in more than one sense, but no more so. Thereafter every block has its imposing monument to commerce. Silverware is represented by Gorham's at Thirty-sixth Street. Furs in magnificent display fill the windows of Gunther's Sons between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh. At ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... women; men mechanically put a date and address to their communications. And these five-franc pieces?"—(I hauled them forth from my purse)—"if she had offered me them herself instead of tying them up with a thread of green silk in a kind of Lilliputian packet, I could have thrust them back into her little hand, and shut up the small, taper fingers over them—so—and compelled her shame, her pride, her shyness, all to yield to a little bit of determined Will—now where is she? How ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... epithet which is prefixt to all the virtues is invariably the epithet which geographically describes the country that I am in. For instance, not to take any real name, if I am in the kingdom of Lilliput, I hear of the Lilliputian virtues. I hear courage, I hear common sense, and I hear political wisdom called by that name. If I cross to the neighboring Republic Blefusca—for since Swift's time it has become a Republic—I hear all these virtues ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser

... of the review; and now, with the assistance of their rather Lilliputian battery, and Tom's double headers, they went through some firing quite loud enough to make the little girls start and jump uncomfortably; so this part of the entertainment was brought to rather a sudden conclusion. Jerry had just issued the order, "Close up in ranks to dismiss," when Mr. ...
— Red, White, Blue Socks. Part Second - Being the Second Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow

... else it must have been thought was the condition of the roads at night during the assizes. At that time, all the law business of populous Liverpool, and also of populous Manchester, with its vast cincture of populous rural districts, was called up by ancient usage to the tribunal of Lilliputian Lancaster. To break up this old traditional usage required, 1, a conflict with powerful established interests, 2, a large system of new arrangements, and 3, a new parliamentary statute. But as yet this change was merely in contemplation. ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... and perils. But we shall preserve it; and our mass of weight and wealth on the good side is so great, as to leave no danger that force will ever be attempted against us. We have only to awake and snap the Lilliputian cords with which they have been entangling us during the first sleep ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... first snow-storm of the New England winter. Bound for warmer skies, she was, however, soon in the waters of the Gulf Stream, where the work of collecting began in the fields of Sargassum, those drifting, wide-spread expanses of loose sea-weed carrying a countless population, lilliputian in size, to be sure, but very various in character. Agassiz was no less interested than other naturalists have been in the old question so long asked and still unanswered, about the Sargassum. "Where is its home, and what ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... officers live. All the soil is clay, stickier and greasier than one could believe possible. It's like almost solid paint, and the least rain makes the sides of the trenches slimy, and the bottom a perfect sea of mud—pulls the heels off your boots almost. One feels like Gulliver walking along a Lilliputian town all the time. The front line of trenches—the firing line—have scientific loopholes and lookout places in them for seeing and firing from, and a dropping fire goes on from both sides all day long, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... teach the art of dwarfing, training, and grafting trees and plants, and of laying out miniature landscapes, into which artificial mountains and valleys are introduced, and very frequently lakes, studded with lilliputian fern-covered islands, around which gold and silver fish may be seen darting about; or, if the sun is hot, taking refuge under curious Japanese bridges, or the broad leaves of the lotus, which usually cover a portion of the ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver

... Lilliputian against the bulk of the hull they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie Louise with caution across tremulous planks, through dark caverns into the hold ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes



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



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