Word.ws English Dictionary

small beers

small beers is the plural of small beer.

Meaning of small beer

Noun

small beer (countable and uncountable, plural small beers)

  1. Beer with a low alcoholic content, usually between 0.5% and 2.8%.
    • It was then that the large footmen were too much employed at Clavering Park to be able to bring messages, or dally over the cup of small beer with the poor little maids at Fairoaks1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC
  2. (UK, figuratively, uncountable) Something that is of relatively little importance.
    • The income from standard widgets is small beer compared to the income from the gold-plated ones.
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see small, beer.

Questions about small beers

What is small beers the plural of?
Small beers is the plural of small beer.

Words near small beers in the dictionary

  1. small arm
  2. small arms
  3. small ball
  4. Small Banisilan
  5. small beer
  6. small beers
  7. small bikkies
  8. small blind
  9. small blinds
  10. small block
  11. small blue

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: small beers (page history and authors); small beer (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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