dwarfish

comparative more dwarfish · superlative most dwarfish · alternative dwarvish

1. Like a dwarf; being especially small or stunted.

   The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish.

   1843, Edgar Allan Poe, The Gold-Bug

   4 more examples

   […] now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief.

   c. 1606 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Macbeth”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene ii]

   1757, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Section XXIV, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, London: John C. Nimmo, 1887, Volume I, p. 242, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15043/15043-h/15043-h.htm Besides the extraordinary great in every species, the opposite to this, the dwarfish and diminutive, ought to be considered. Littleness, merely as such, has nothing contrary to the idea of beauty.

   Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation […]

   1886, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

   There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade.

   1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter I, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC

2. Of, pertaining to, or made by or for dwarves.

   Dwarfish axes are some of the finest weapons available.