Vocabulary
Paltry
English and Urdu gloss, synonyms and antonyms, and example usage from our editorial sentence cache where available.
English meaning
(of an amount) very small or meagre.
Urdu meaning
عمولی، حقیر،ادنیٰ
Example sentences (from Dawn)
Sentences are selected from stored editorial text where your search word appears. If none appear yet, run the admin sentence generator for fuller coverage.
- Between FY2022-23 and FY2025-26, irrigation absorbed a staggering 460 billion in allocations, dwarfing the paltry sums allotted to agriculture itself.
- Look at the paltry higher education budget allocation for the next fiscal year: public sector universities cannot even make salary and pension payments.
- It has been allocated less than a tenth of the amount it requires for next year in the federal budget, with a paltry Rs3.2bn approved against a requirement of Rs40bn.
- Between 1979 and 2022, real (ie, inflation adjusted) wages for middle and low-income workers in the US, showed paltry growth of a mere 12 per cent, even when overall productivity has increased by almost 80pc.
- Between 1979 and 2022, real (ie, inflation adjusted) wages for middle and low-income workers in the US, showed paltry growth of a mere 12 per cent, even when overall productivity has increased by almost 80pc.
Synonyms
small,insignificant, meagre, insufficient, trifling, negligible,derisory, inadequate, scant
Antonyms
considerable, substantial
Curator example
“she would earn a paltry Rs33 more a month”
More vocabulary to explore
About this vocabulary section.
These entries support close reading of Dawn editorials and opinion pieces: short definitions,
Urdu equivalents where we have them, word relations, and—when generated—real lines from the editorial archive
so you can see tone and usage.
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- Where do the example sentences come from?
- When available, example sentences are drawn from cached matches in our Dawn editorial corpus so you can see how a word is used in real newsroom-style prose.
- How is this different from a dictionary?
- This section is curated for students preparing for competitive exams and editorial reading. Entries are compact, often include Urdu glosses, and are paired with in-context lines from editorials when we have them.
