Other forms: pinpricks
A pinprick is a tiny puncture, or a small irritation. A pinprick of light, pinprick wounds, a pinprick of doubt.
The literal sense is a puncture too small to matter and the figurative one keeps that scale — a pinprick of doubt is small and will not go away. Pinprick pupils are a clinical sign. Note that the compound is pin plus prick and says exactly what it is.
1nounpinprickA tiny puncture, or a small irritation.
“The stars were tiny pinpricks of light in the black sky.”
pinprick is a tiny puncture.
Pin plus prick, a plain English compound.
From pin + prick.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA