pissant

See also: piss-ant and piss ant

English

Alternative forms

• piss-ant

Etymology

From piss +‎ ant, because of the urine-like smell of anthills. Compare pismire.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈpɪsænt/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

Noun

pissant (plural pissants)

1. (dated outside dialects) An ant.
2. (derogatory) An insignificant person.

   Synonym: nobody

   • 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.

   • 2005 January 24, Seymour M. Hersh, “The Coming Wars”, in The New Yorker‎^[1], archived from the original on 2015-08-25, page 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.”

3. (derogatory) A person who adheres strictly to a rule or policy despite current circumstances.

   Their manager is a real pissant about break times.

4. (derogatory) A person seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but the trivial, especially in the sense of trivial or irrelevant criticism.

Adjective

pissant (comparative more pissant, superlative most pissant)

1. (sometimes vulgar) Insignificant or unimportant.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:insignificant

   • 1997 August 20, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, “Weight Gain 4000”, in South Park, season 1, episode 2, spoken by Mayor McDaniels:

     This is our chance to make a name for ourselves; to show that we're not just some piss-ant white-bread mountain town.

   • 2003, Tony Kushner, Angels in America, spoken by Roy Cohn (Al Pacino):

     A homosexual is somebody who, in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through the city council.

   • 2020, Brandon Taylor, Real Life, Daunt Books Originals, page 222:

     ‘He was just this little pissant kid, Wallace.’

Further reading

• “pissant”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “pissant”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.

Anagrams

• ptisans, spastin

French

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /pi.sɑ̃/

• Audio

  (file)

Adjective

pissant (feminine pissante, masculine plural pissants, feminine plural pissantes)

1. (Quebec, colloquial) funny

Participle

pissant

1. present participle of pisser

Further reading

• “pissant”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.