DIMINUTIVE • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Diminutive

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/dɪmˈɪnjətɪv/ Listen

adjective

Diminutive adj.

Below the average size; very small; little.

Expressing diminution; as, a diminutive word.

Tending to diminish. (R.) "Diminutive of liberty."

noun

Diminutive n.

Something of very small size or value; an insignificant thing. "Such water flies, diminutives of nature."

(Gram.) A derivative from a noun, denoting a small or a young object of the same kind with that denoted by the primitive; as, gosling, eaglet, lambkin. "Babyisms and dear diminutives." Note: The word sometimes denotes a derivative verb which expresses a diminutive or petty form of the action, as scribble.

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Etymology of 'Diminutive'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Diminutive" Quotes from Famous Books

... others were possible, because the mind was filled with merely tribal legends. What was called early civilization was only relatively splendid. There was unsurpassed poetry but no science, ample brawn but diminutive brain, much passion but little love. Out of the darkness of the past the stream of history, very narrow and shallow at first, has emerged and steadily expanded and deepened. Men are now equally intense but far clearer ...

— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... who is making his life a part of a hundred or a thousand or a million lives, thus illimitably intensifying or multiplying his own, instead of living as you in what otherwise would be his own little, diminutive self, will find himself ascending higher and higher until he stands as one among the few, and will find a peace, a happiness, a satisfaction so rich and so beautiful, compared to which yours will be but a poor miserable something, ...

— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine

... up-curving snout; the roll and lunge of the gait, like the motion of a vessel plunging forward before the wind; the rounded immensity of the trunk, and the huge bluntness of the posteriors; and all these features are combined with such masterly unity of conception and plastic vigor, that the diminutive model insensibly grows mighty beneath your gaze, until you realize the monster as if he stood stupendous and grim before you. In the first of the figures the bear has paused in his great stride to paw over and snuff at the horned head of a mountain sheep, half buried in the soil. The ...

— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... the front door behind him he caught a look back in the room. Framed in the doorway stood a very small pickaninny, barely reaching to the knob. She was barefoot, in a blue calico dress, with her hair done in two kinky braids that stood out in front like diminutive horns. In her arms she held tightly clutched an old corn shock wrapped in a red rag. One hand grasped the doorpost. And she was watching him wide eyed ...

— Stubble • George Looms

... tart, and left it without a pang. But when the old man urged him, for the third time, to take that pernicious draught with his cheese, he angrily demanded a glass of beer. The old man toddled out of the room, and on his return he proffered to him a diminutive glass of white spirit, which he called usquebaugh. Phineas, happy to get a little whisky, said nothing more about the beer, and ...

— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

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