How to Use pinprick in a Sentence

pinprick

noun
  • He felt a pinprick in his leg.
  • Light from eclipse entered a pinprick hole in the foil, wrapped around the top of the box.
    Peter Rowe, sandiegouniontribune.com, 21 Aug. 2017
  • Three of its moons can be seen as pinpricks of light on the left side.
    Will Sullivan, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 July 2023
  • After all, the place is just a pinprick on a wall-sized map of the world.
    Smithsonian Magazine, 10 July 2023
  • The photo of Spears's right foot shows the wound, which looks like a pinprick with a bruise around it.
    Maggie O'Neill, Health.com, 10 Sep. 2021
  • In the film, the impact appears as a pinprick flash of light on the edge of the planet’s round face.
    Andrew Fazekas, National Geographic, 30 Mar. 2016
  • All from a pinprick and the extraction of a small, but bloody meal.
    Paul Richards, Field & Stream, 9 Nov. 2023
  • In the distance, two pinprick white lights emerge from the blackness.
    James Nestor, Scientific American, 12 Feb. 2018
  • My face was raw and dotted with pinpricks of red, my eyes glassy and puffy.
    Jillian Dunham, Longreads, 28 Jan. 2020
  • Yet in the midst of all this bleakness, Barry still finds pinpricks of hope that the truth might set one free.
    Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter, 29 May 2023
  • The last hints of sunlight peeking through the valleys of the moon will make for pinpricks of brilliance.
    Matthew Cappucci, BostonGlobe.com, 8 Apr. 2023
  • Take Theranos, which pledged to perform tons of tests on just a pinprick of blood.
    Rachel Becker, The Verge, 18 May 2018
  • Meanwhile, the North is in complete darkness, save for a tiny pinprick of light in Pyongyang.
    Anchorage Daily News, 18 Feb. 2018
  • People peered into the charcoal-gray night trying to keep the boat in sight and to spot a yellow-red pinprick.
    Marguerite Holloway, The New Yorker, 31 Aug. 2021
  • When glial cells were turned off via gene editing, the mice were less sensitive to pain such as pinpricks.
    National Geographic, 9 Jan. 2020
  • In the evening, a gigantic bowl with thousands of pinprick holes is inverted over the Earth—or so the thinking went.
    TIME.com, 25 Oct. 2017
  • The next day, Megan noticed a small pinprick on her arm, surrounded by a bruise and paired with an ache that bothered her for a few days.
    Matilda Martin, refinery29.com, 21 Oct. 2021
  • This image is just one-twentieth of the night sky, a mere pinprick of a window into the universe.
    Brian Resnick, Vox, 26 Apr. 2018
  • About a half-dozen years ago, Boten was a casino boomtown, a pinprick of neon amid thickly forested hills.
    Sebastian Strangio, New York Times, 6 July 2016
  • The heads of more recent scorpion species are adorned with multiple rows of beady, pinprick eyes.
    Katherine J. Wu, Smithsonian Magazine, 16 Jan. 2020
  • Maybe the odd sock — navy with stripes or black with pinprick holes — should stay in the clothes hamper, waiting for its mate to show up, through months of washing cycles and seasons.
    Beth Thames | [email protected], al, 5 Feb. 2020
  • One of Kitamura’s gifts, though, is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread.
    New York Times, 14 July 2021
  • These cameras need ways to peel faint pinpricks of light away from bright host stars, like finding a firefly sitting on the rim of a distant spotlight.
    Joshua Sokol, WIRED, 28 May 2018
  • It’s all documented on small pieces of paper that pile up back at Save the Rhino Trust headquarters in the pinprick of a town, Palmwag.
    Melanie Stetson Freeman, The Christian Science Monitor, 25 Jan. 2024
  • Vines cross your path, a leaf dances in a pinprick of sun, a patch of turbid water like polished gunmetal promises a clearing in the distance.
    Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 24 Jan. 2024
  • Louis XIV would have understood: The proposal was pure strategy, a small pinprick, to make sense out of the visit.
    Joseph Giovannini, New York Times, 5 Aug. 2016
  • One evening, as the pinpricks of stars began to perforate the summer’s sky, the three of us walked along the moonlit beach, the rhythmic waves of the Atlantic crashing against the shadowy shoreline.
    S. Kirk Walsh, Longreads, 22 Jan. 2018
  • These are the nerve cells that respond to painful stimuli like a pinch, a pinprick, a hot stove or a chemical irritant such as a chili pepper.
    Karen Weintraub, USA Today, 11 Dec. 2022
  • Ms Holmes has certainly left a mark on Silicon Valley—and not a mere pinprick.
    The Economist, 17 Mar. 2018
  • But from the star of Godzilla to the creatures of Pacific Rim, the beasts that will attack will probably shrug off these shells as nothing more than pinpricks.
    Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, 22 Mar. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'pinprick.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: