Word.ws English Dictionary

row of pins

row of pins noun: an insignificant thing, a whit.

Noun

row of pins

  1. (dated, idiomatic) An insignificant thing, a whit.
    • “[…] they wouldn’t let us have even a row of pins without the money for ’em—no, not if we was to drop down dead for want of bread in their shops.”1851, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia […] , volume 1, page 358
    • He knew that big nations did not care a row of pins for small nations, but only used them as pawns, and he knew that the role of a pawn in a game is, too often, to be taken.1956, Carlile Aylmer Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945, volume 1, page 109
    Synonyms:
    hill of beans

Synonyms of row of pins

Origin of row of pins

From the disposable rows of pins used in sewing.

Questions about row of pins

What does row of pins mean?
Row of pins means an insignificant thing, a whit.
What part of speech is row of pins?
Row of pins is a noun.

Words near row of pins in the dictionary

  1. row echelon form
  2. row echelon forms
  3. row house
  4. row houses
  5. row in the same boat
  6. row of pins
  7. row space
  8. row spaces
  9. row to hoe
  10. row up
  11. row vector

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: row of pins (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.

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