How to Use pittance in a Sentence

pittance

noun
  • Looking back on this race, the Be a Hero fund is a pittance.
    Washington Post, 2 Nov. 2020
  • Might seem a pittance now, but, back then, a lot of you lost your minds.
    Kevin Sherrington, Dallas News, 7 Mar. 2021
  • The only price to pay is a fair amount of clouds and a stray shower, a pittance.
    Washington Post, 3 Mar. 2022
  • The game show’s promise of small-scale wealth for the very few is replaced by HQ’s promise of a pittance for the few.
    Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 22 Dec. 2017
  • Time and again, the money extracted from the tech giants amounts to a pittance.
    Wired, 4 Sep. 2019
  • That would be a pittance compared to what customers lost.
    Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN, 24 July 2024
  • Her next check will be a pittance, the rent is already overdue, and there are no savings.
    Matt Sedensky, The Seattle Times, 3 Sep. 2017
  • But that aid may prove to be a pittance to what lawmakers are now lining up.
    Tom Benning, Dallas News, 20 Mar. 2020
  • Heck, 20 years from now, $28 million in earnings might seem like a pittance.
    Art Wilson, Orange County Register, 2 Feb. 2017
  • That means the millions who had their data hijacked but not yet abused could get a pittance.
    Hiawatha Bray, BostonGlobe.com, 30 July 2019
  • Programs like the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho shrank to a pittance.
    Stephania Taladrid, The New Yorker, 12 Apr. 2022
  • The point isn’t that Starbucks workers, or anyone, should make a pittance.
    Erik Sherman, Forbes, 27 Jan. 2023
  • Allen described $60 billion as a pittance for one of the largest industries in the country.
    Priscilla Totiyapungprasert, The Arizona Republic, 21 Oct. 2021
  • Banks are paying a pittance on deposits, but customers don’t seem to care.
    Orla McCaffrey, WSJ, 12 Nov. 2020
  • That $257 billion is a pittance compared with the needs of the American people.
    Jeffrey Sachs, CNN, 1 June 2021
  • When Leonard Green made its third attempt to exit, the nominal price was a pittance.
    Peter Elkind, ProPublica, 30 Sep. 2020
  • The donation is a pittance for AT&T, with $19.4 billion in profit last year.
    Washington Post, 27 June 2019
  • A few years after Shapira’s suicide, at least some of them were sold at an auction for a pittance.
    New York Times, 28 Mar. 2021
  • The current ones are catching a pittance of the overall heat-trapping emissions.
    Ken Silverstein, Forbes, 6 June 2021
  • On the other hand, Armstrong got out this mess for a relative pittance.
    Bill Gifford, Outside Online, 20 Apr. 2018
  • And in class-action suits like what the plaintiffs are seeking, claimants usually collect a pittance next to what the lawyers take in.
    WSJ, 25 Dec. 2018
  • Cacao is mostly grown in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, where farmers are often paid a pittance for their crops.
    WIRED, 6 Nov. 2023
  • The government filed suit and offered a pittance for the property.
    Ephrat Livni, Quartz, 13 Feb. 2020
  • Compared to the billions of dollars poured into Covid vaccines, the funds for malaria are a pittance.
    Apoorva Mandavilli Kang-Chun Cheng, New York Times, 4 Oct. 2022
  • That’s still a pittance of Wal-Mart’s 2 million associates, so the trickle-down effect will take a while.
    Diane Stafford, kansascity.com, 11 May 2017
  • The leading services pay pittances to artists—usually, less than one cent per play.
    Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 31 July 2023
  • Tumul gave Joe his land for a pittance but died before his people saw more than a secondhand truck out of the deal.
    Sean Flynn, Smithsonian, 23 Feb. 2018
  • And attorneys appointed to take those cases in Alabama at the time of the Clemons case were paid a pittance.
    Seth Freed Wessler, ProPublica, 28 May 2011
  • Only a decade ago, oil majors were signing up to be paid a relative pittance per barrel for the chance to drill in Iraq.
    Washington Post, 23 Sep. 2019
  • The United States, by contrast, produces a relative pittance of most of these critical minerals and refines even less.
    Morgan D. Bazilian, Foreign Affairs, 6 Jan. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'pittance.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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