Definition
adjNot large or big; insignificant; few in number.
adjNot large or big; insignificant; few in number., Humiliated or insignificant.
Sentence Examples
My shoes are too small. I need new ones.
Spenser's mother often scrutinizes him for every small mistake he makes.
There are small shops and pavement cafes around every corner.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English smal, smale, small, smalle, smel, smæl, from Old English smæl (“narrow, slim; slender; fine; small; quiet”), from Proto-West Germanic *smal, from Proto-Germanic *smalaz (“small”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)mal- (“small; little”).
Cognates
Cognate with Scots smaw (“small; minor”), Yola smaale, small (“small”), North Frisian smaal, smeel, smääl (“narrow”), Saterland Frisian smäl (“narrow”), West Frisian smel (“narrow”), Alemannic German schmaal (“narrow”), Bavarian schmoi (“narrow; slender”), Dutch smal (“narrow; small”), German schmal (“narrow; slender”), Low German small (“narrow; slender, small”), Luxembourgish schmuel (“narrow”), Vilamovian śmoł, šmoł (“narrow”), Yiddish שמאָל (shmol, “narrow”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish smal (“narrow; slim”), Gothic 𐍃𐌼𐌰𐌻𐌹𐍃𐍄𐍃 (smalists, “smallest”); also Latin malus (“bad, distressing, nasty; evil, mischievous, wicked; destructive, hurtful, noxious; abusive, hostile, unkind”), Belarusian малы́ (malý, “small”), Bulgarian and Macedonian мал (mal, “small; minor”), Czech and Slovak malý (“small”), Polish mały (“small; little; humble; short”), Russian ма́лый (mályj, “small; short”), Serbo-Croatian ма̑л, mȃl (“small”), Ukrainian мали́й (malýj, “small”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Here, in the transept and choir, where the service was being held, one was conscious every moment of an increasing brightness; colours glowing vividly beneath the circular chandeliers, and the rows of small lights on the choristers' desks flashed and sparkled in front of the boys' faces, deep linen collars, and red neckbands."
— 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter V, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
"Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster."
— 2013 June 22, “Engineers of a different kind”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8841, archived from the original on 25 Nov 2020, page 70:
"The orbiter has been observing the moon since 2009, and its reflector is a smaller version of reflector panels placed on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 landings on the moon. Soviet lunar robotic landers sent in 1970 and 1973 also carried smaller reflectors."
— 2020 August 13, Ashley Strickland, “The reason we’re shooting laser beams between Earth and the moon”, in CNN:
"Guinness World Record confirmed the micro-cube as the world’s smallest rotating puzzle cube in August."
— 2024 October 4, Chris Lau and Nodoka Katsura, “This is the world’s smallest Rubik’s Cube. And it actually works”, in CNN:
"For all the times that you made me feel small / I fell in love, now I feel nothing at all"
— 2015, Justin Bieber, Love Yourself: