Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Of little value or importance; paltry. synonym: trivial.
- adjective Petty; small-minded.
- noun A Spanish-American half-real piece formerly used in parts of the southern United States.
- noun A five-cent piece.
- noun Something of very little value; a trifle.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Formerly, in Florida, Louisiana, and adjacent regions, the Spanish half-real, equal to 1⅙ of a dollar, or 6¼ cents; now, the five-cent piece or any similar small coin.
- Small; petty; of little value or account: as, picayune politics.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Local, U.S. A small coin of the value of six and a quarter cents. See
fippenny bit .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
Petty ,trivial ; of little consequence; small and of little importance;picayunish ; - adjective something not worth arguing about.
- adjective an
argument ,fact , corner case, or other issue raised (oftenintentionally ) that distracts from a larger issue at hand or does not change a primarysupposition ,outcome ,postulate ,premise ,conclusion ,hypothesis ,judgment or recommendation; - adjective small-minded: being childishly
spiteful , tending to go on about unimportant things. - noun US, archaic A small coin of the value of six and a quarter cents; a
fippenny bit . - noun A five-cent piece.
- noun Something of very little value; a trifle: not worth a picayune.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective (informal) small and of little importance
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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A picayune was the price of a small sheet in my time.
Social life in old New Orleans : being recollections of my girlhood, 1912
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A picayune was the smallest coin the richly appareled madame or the poor market negro could put in the collection box as she paused on her way at the
Social life in old New Orleans : being recollections of my girlhood, 1912
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Yet in a move that can only be described as picayune and small-minded, a program designed to make the House cafeteria greener has been eliminated.
The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com Jonathan A. Schein 2011
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It seems kind of picayune in the grand context of the stimulus effort.
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It seems kind of picayune in the grand context of the stimulus effort.
The Calculus (and Politics) of Stimulus II Robert O 2009
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However, the "picayune" promises are the types of promises made by most people.
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That's how bad the Times' "picayune" coverage has been...that no one, and I mean no one, cares enough to show up for the only televised debate of the campaign.
10 things I think I think about the televised "Conversation with the Candidates" Peter Schorsch 2009
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First of all, Wayne Garcia is part of the same coverage he describe as "picayune" in the rest of the article.
Wayne Garcia says I am a "one-man election wrecking crew" -- I can't say he's wrong Peter Schorsch 2009
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And frankly, maybe we can come up with something better than the Shroud, which looks kind of picayune in its new company.
Kenneth Hite's Journal princeofcairo 2008
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- Ron Wilson had a bone to pick with a "picayune" call by the officials late in Thursday night's 3-2 overtime loss to Tampa Bay.
Ottawa Sun 2010
whichbe commented on the word picayune
Something of small value; of something petty or worthless.
To judge from a hunt around in newspaper files and such, this word might now seem to be rare, though I am reliably informed that it is by no means defunct. All the recent examples I can find, without exception, refer to one or other of the American journals whose names include it, in particular the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
An odd name for a newspaper, you may feel. But when its precursor, the New Orleans Picayune, began life on 25 January 1837, the main sense of the word was that of a small coin. It was at first applied in Florida and Louisiana to the Spanish half-real, worth just over six cents; in the early nineteenth century it was transferred to the US five-cent piece. The proprietors of the new newspaper gave it that name because that's what a copy cost.
The Beeville Bee-Picayune in Texas took its name from the New Orleans newspaper more than a century ago as a sort of homage. Could this be true also of other journals that include the word in their titles? The town of Picayune, Mississippi, was given its name by Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicholson, the owner and publisher of the New Orleans Daily Picayune, who grew up in nearby Pearlington.
Scholars are less than totally certain about where the word came from, though the immediate origin is the French picaillon for an old copper coin of Savoy (in modern French, picaillons is a slangy term for money). In turn that derived from Provençal picaioun. Here the trail peters out, but that might have been taken from Italian piccolo, little or small, or more probably from Provençal piquar, to clink or sound.
(from World Wide Words)
May 22, 2008
seanahan commented on the word picayune
Very interesting Whichbe.
May 27, 2008
chained_bear commented on the word picayune
See also the word history on picaioun. :)
August 30, 2008