Search the Dictionary

The state or quality of having a little or ignoble mind; pettiness; meanness; -- opposed to magnanimity. De Quincey.

The quality or state of being petty or paltry; littleness; meanness.

To be pitied for littleness or meanness; miserable; paltry; contemptible; despicable. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Shak.

in a proverb; used as a proverb; hence, commonly known; as, a proverbial expression; his meanness was proverbial. In case of excesses, I take the German proverbial cure, by a hair of the same beast, to be the worst. Sir W. Temple.

Extreme meanness, affectation, conceit, or impudence. A. Chalmers.

fty contempt; haughty disregard; that disdain which aprings from the opinion of the utter meanness and unworthiness of an object. Scorn at first makes after love the more. Shak. And wandered backward as in scorn, To wait an æon to be born. Emerson.

The quality or state of being scurvy; vileness; meanness.

assumed; genuine; true; real; as, a sincere desire for knowledge; a sincere contempt for meanness. A sincere intention of pleasing God in all our actions. Law.

To act in a stealthy and cowardly manner; to behave with meanness and servility; to crouch.

Impressive in sound; high-sounding. The Italian opera, amidst all the meanness and familiarty of the thoughts, has something beautiful and sonorous in the expression. Addison. There is nothing of the artificial Johnsonian balance in his style. It is as often marked by a pregnant brevity as by a sonorous amplitude. E. E…

erner; also, applied sometimes by foreigners to any inhabitant of the United States. From meanness first this Portsmouth Yankey rose, And still to meanness all his conduct flows. Oppression, A poem by an American (Boston, 1765).