How to Use small-time in a Sentence

small-time

adjective
  • The small-time thinkers of the faculty won the day, but probably doomed BSC in the process.
    Joseph Goodman | Jgoodman@al.com, al, 23 Feb. 2023
  • From Kennedys and Capote to small-time crooks, this summer isn’t short on characters.
    Town & Country, 13 June 2023
  • This story of a small-time New England criminal takes on the proportions of an epic tragedy.
    The Week Staff, The Week, 10 Apr. 2023
  • There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar crews in Atlanta, many with three-letter names, most of them small-time.
    Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, 28 Aug. 2023
  • So far, the law’s most noticeable effects seem to be sending droves of tourists to New Jersey and frustrating small-time Airbnb hosts.
    Amanda Hoover, WIRED, 5 Mar. 2024
  • These four teenagers laze around the neighborhood, pulling small-time heists and oddball capers, but also mourning the loss of their friend Daniel, who took his own life prior to the start of the show.
    Phillip MacIak, The New Republic, 27 Sep. 2023
  • After leaving the academy in 1980, Mr. Prigozhin fell in with street gangs and was arrested for small-time thefts as a juvenile.
    Brian Murphy, Washington Post, 26 Aug. 2023
  • Belivuk might have remained a small-time thug had his life not intersected with the rise of Aleksandar Vucic.
    Robert F. Worth, New York Times, 3 May 2023
  • Rocky Sylvester Stallone plays small-time boxer who gets the rare chance to fight a heavyweight champion in Philadelphia.
    Ben Flanagan | Bflanagan@al.com, al, 8 Apr. 2023
  • But even in a scenario that leaves small-time entrepreneurs in the dust, some advocates argue that medicalization would be a net good.
    Jane C. Hu, The Atlantic, 8 Apr. 2024
  • Hardly anyone wanted to talk about much else — especially not a small-time football team in the second year of its rebirth.
    Rainer Sabin, Detroit Free Press, 1 May 2023
  • The Bohemians: This small-time soccer team in Dublin has made support for social causes a crucial part of its identity.
    Ed O’Loughlin, New York Times, 1 Apr. 2024
  • The Bohemians: This small-time soccer team in Dublin has made support for social causes a crucial part of its identity.
    Megan Specia, New York Times, 20 Mar. 2024
  • Some are wealthy Russians buying vehicles for themselves, or small-time entrepreneurs looking to resell cars for a quick buck.
    Jack Ewing, New York Times, 11 May 2023
  • Sonny Vaccarro was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner and a small-time basketball coach.
    Corbin Smith, Rolling Stone, 8 Apr. 2023
  • The fact that the small-time local bureaucrat — and not the investors or the lawyers — had suffered the most severely spoke to the real-life consequences of financial fraud, which often seems so abstract and opaque.
    Jesse Barron, New York Times, 9 Feb. 2024
  • Dealers—most selling crystal meth, or shabu, the drug of choice of the Filipino poor—as well as addicts, former addicts, and small-time criminals became targets.
    Joshua Hammer, The Atlantic, 29 Nov. 2023
  • Before that, Cooke had grown immensely wealthy by building an investment network that sold more than $1.6 billion in Civil War bonds to small-time investors across the North.
    Mickey Butts, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 Sep. 2023
  • Her husband began to make small-time drug deals, selling homegrown marijuana and poppies, used to make heroin.
    Brian Murphy, Washington Post, 13 Dec. 2023
  • The book’s sadder portraits are of the many small investors who lost their shirts (and in some cases their lives; small-time crypto investors have distressingly high suicide rates) in this fiasco.
    Jacob Bacharach, The New Republic, 18 Sep. 2023
  • Grand openers Brandi Carlile and Grouplove Opening bands are often small-time acts, looking for exposure and stage practice.
    Joshua Medintz, The Enquirer, 27 July 2023
  • At first, Will seems like an everyman, and Kendall gives him an approachable reticence in the face of Kaminsky’s effectively broader portrayal of a small-time big-box tyrant.
    Vulture, 21 Feb. 2023
  • Proprietor Chris Gore says the site receives upwards of 100 requests for coverage each week from small-time filmmakers looking for reviews.
    Christopher Null, WIRED, 7 Feb. 2024
  • But Prigozhin—who was once Russian president Vladimir Putin’s chef and a small-time criminal—also held a title as one of the world’s biggest disinformation peddlers.
    Matt Burgess, WIRED, 5 Sep. 2023
  • Most jurors determined that a plan engineered by Tavares Calloway to rob some small-time weed dealers nearly three decades ago went horribly sideways.
    Charles Rabin, Miami Herald, 25 Mar. 2024
  • Councilor Michael Flaherty, a member of the body’s more moderate bloc, proposed an additional exemption for small-time landlords who live in Boston and own up to six units.
    Catherine Carlock, BostonGlobe.com, 8 Mar. 2023
  • Most of them were small-time forgeries, such as a fossilized bird with false feathers painted on it and a headless aquatic reptile with the skull of another individual grafted on to make the skeleton complete.
    Daniel T. Ksepka, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2023
  • Bouncers and prostitutes and small-time gangsters appear with filthy annotations; Black and Turkish residents of Brussels, not to mention colonists in pith helmets, also recur in his scenes of clubs and bars.
    Jason Farago, New York Times, 20 Dec. 2023
  • But the realities of Mai’s job meant managing 80 or 90 cases at once — small-time copper thefts, drug deals and domestic disputes that typically ended with his clients cutting deals and pleading guilty to lesser charges.
    Eli Saslow Erin Schaff, New York Times, 25 June 2023
  • TikTok’s fee changes could be most challenging for small-time or individual sellers that embraced its shopping platform, some hawking cheap or questionable items.
    Amanda Hoover, WIRED, 1 Apr. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'small-time.' 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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