Definition of "runt"

runt

/ˈɹʌnt/

noun
plural runts
1. The smallest animal of a litter.
  Quotations
  Sometimes, as we have seen, one member of a litter is a runt, much smaller than the rest. He is unable to fight for food as strongly as the rest, and runts often die. We have considered the conditions under which it would actually pay a mother to let a runt die.
  1976, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Kindle edition, OUP Oxford, published 2016, page 168
2. (by extension) The smallest child in the family.
3. Undersized or stunted plant, animal or person.
4. (slang) An uninfluential or unimportant person; a nobody.
5. (networking) An Ethernet packet that does not meet the medium's minimum packet size of 64 bytes.
6. (typography) A single word (or portion of a hyphenated word) that appears as the last line of a paragraph.
7. A breed of pigeon related to the carrier pigeon.
8. (obsolete, UK, dialect) A hardened stem or stalk of a plant.
  Quotations
  Neither young poles nor old runts are durable
  1601, C[aius] Plinius Secundus [i.e., Pliny the Elder], “[Book XVI.]”, in Philemon Holland, transl., The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus. […], 1st tome, London: […] Adam Islip, published 1635
9. A bow.