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Puissant vs Pissant - What's the difference?

puissant | pissant |

As adjectives the difference between puissant and pissant

is that puissant is powerful, mighty, having authority while pissant is insignificant or unimportant.

As a noun pissant is

an ant.

puissant

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Powerful, mighty, having authority.
  • * 1599 — Shakespeare, Hen V i 2
    • Awake remembrance of these valiant dead, / And with your puissant arm renew their feats.
  • * 1667 — Book I
    • For who can yet believe, though after loss,
    That all these puissant legions, whose exile
    Hath emptied Heaven, shall fail to re-ascend,
    Self-raised, and repossess their native seat?
  • *
    • I cried in a loud voice, "Long live the most puissant king of Lilliput!"
  • * 1851 ,
    • How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?
  • * 1961 -
    • In fact the titles could be anything-or (with some of the most puissant ) no title at all...

    Related terms

    * puissance

    Anagrams

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    pissant

    English

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • (dated, outside, dialects) An ant.
  • (pejorative) An insignificant person.
  • (pejorative) A person who adheres strictly to a rule or policy despite current circumstances.
    • Their super is a real pissant about break times.
  • (pejorative) A person seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but the trivial, especially in the sense of trivial or irrelevant criticism.

    • Quotations

    * 2005 January 31, The New Yorker , 24: *: “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants .’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.” * 1993 , PJ O'Rourke, Democracy in its diapers'' in ''Give war a chance (Picador): *: It is the beauty of well designed fascism that it gives every piss-ant an ant hill to piss from.

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Insignificant or unimportant.

    • Anagrams

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