Word.ws English Dictionary

pennywise

pennywise adjective: careful with small amounts of money or over small matters.

Adjective

pennywise (not comparable)

  1. Careful with small amounts of money or over small matters.
    • Now some employers are reversing course, convinced that their pennywise approach does not always reduce long-term costs.2007 February 21, Milt Freudenheim, “Some Employers Are Offering Free Drugs”, in New York Times

Origin of pennywise

From penny + wise.

Questions about pennywise

What does pennywise mean?
Pennywise means careful with small amounts of money or over small matters.
What part of speech is pennywise?
Pennywise is an adjective.

Words near pennywise in the dictionary

  1. pennyweights
  2. Pennywell
  3. Pennywells
  4. pennywhistle
  5. pennywhistles
  6. pennywise
  7. pennywort
  8. pennyworth
  9. pennyworths
  10. pennyworts
  11. peno-

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pennywise (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “pennywise.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pennywise. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.