Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Petty for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's word is "Petty" — adjective, pronounced /ˈpeti/, with the stress on "pet".
Narrator: Something petty is small, trivial and of little real importance, or, of a person, mean-spirited about tiny things.
Narrator: In plain English, it describes fuss over matters too small to deserve the fuss.
Narrator: It comes from the French word petit, meaning small, which entered English in the fourteenth century and settled into its own spelling.
Narrator: A very common collocation is petty cash, the small fund an office keeps for minor everyday expenses.
Narrator: It differs from minor, which is neutral and merely small in scale, while petty often carries a sting of disapproval.
Narrator: There is also petty crime, meaning low-level offences, and the figurative petty squabble, a quarrel over nothing at all.
Narrator: Law, policing, accounting, human resources and everyday office life all lean on this word.
Narrator: So remember: petty means small in size or small in spirit, and usually both at once.
Speaker A: Why does petty sound so unkind when it only means small?
Speaker B: Wonderful question! PETTY comes straight from the French petit, meaning little, and English quietly added a shrug of judgement to it.
Speaker A: So the disapproval is an English invention rather than a French one?
Speaker B: Exactly so, and you can still hear the neutral sense surviving in terms like petty cash and petty officer.
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "She took ten pounds from petty cash." — a small office fund. "He was fined for petty theft." — a minor offence. "Let us not argue over petty details." — points too small to matter.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: Do not spell it petit or pety in English, and remember it doubles the t before the y, giving pettier and pettiest.
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: Trivial is the cousin, small-minded is the twin when you mean mean-spirited, and minor is the polite alternative — but petty keeps its sharp little charm!
Speaker B: Let's use "petty" in AI prompts — useful for triaging bug reports and for moderating community comment threads.
Speaker A: How does it apply to bug triage?
Speaker B: Ask the model to separate the serious from the trifling.
Prompt: Review this list of bug reports and flag which are petty cosmetic issues and which are genuine blockers, giving one reason for each.
Speaker A: And for moderation?
Speaker B: Let it spot quarrels that add no value.
Prompt: Scan this comment thread and identify petty personal disputes that should be closed rather than answered by the support team.
Speaker A: Could it help with code review culture?
Speaker B: Yes, it can soften nitpicking into something useful.
Prompt: Rewrite these code review comments so that petty style complaints are grouped into one short note and the substantive feedback stands out.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: Let's point it at expense tooling.
Prompt: Design a simple petty cash tracking screen for a small finance app, listing the fields, validation rules and monthly report it should produce.
Petty — meaning in Arabic & definition More P courses GL Dictionary