Penny-wise

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Thrifty in regards to small amounts of money.
Adjective
  1. 1
    thrifty in small matters only wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
cannycarefulcharycheeseparingchintzyeconomic

Example

More examples

"It turned out that the smallest container of saffron was also the worst deal. I'm just penny-wise and pound foolish."

Etymology

From penny + wise.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.