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say it: PET-ee
petty is an adjective and noun meaning "inferior in rank or status". It is pronounced /ˈpɛˌti/ — PET-ee. It carries 4 recorded senses.
inferior in rank or status
“the junior faculty”
“a lowly corporal”
“petty officialdom”
“a subordinate functionary”
(informal) small and of little importance
“a fiddling sum of money”
“a footling gesture”
“our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war”
“a little (or small) matter”
“a dispute over niggling details”
“limited to petty enterprises”
“piffling efforts”
“giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction”
colloquialism
contemptibly narrow in outlook
“petty little comments”
“disgusted with their small-minded pettiness”
larceny of property having a value less than some amount (the amount varies by locale)
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for petty come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.