mickle
/ˈmɪkəl/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.21 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Oh mickle is the powerfull grace that lies / In hearbes, plants, ſtones, and their true qualities: / For nought ſo vile, that vile on earth doth liue, / But to the earth ſome ſpeciall good doth giue: […]"
- "O Jupiter! whose ſtrength is mickle, / Was ever man in ſuch a pickle!"
- "She entereth with mickle teen; Within it light ne found she none; Thorow it still she goeth on, Until she from the hill issued In a fair meadow, rich and good."
- "In the Den of Kinraddie one such beast had its lair […] and at gloaming a shepherd would see it, with its great wings half-folded across the great belly of it and its head, like the head of a meikle cock, but with the ears of a lion, poked over a fir tree, watching."
- "They ſay here, […] that ye deſired not the king and England to agree, becauſe it would rack the noblemen, […] I anſwered in your name that I was aſſured you had never ſpoken it. Mr. Archibald [Douglas] is the ſpeaker of it, who I aſſure your lordſhip has been a poiſon in this matter, for they lean very mickle to his opinion."
- "[…] I livd in a house by the Tower, which has not been repaird since Robert Consull of Gloucester repayrd the castle and wall; here I livd warm, but in my house on the hyll the ayre was mickle keen, […]"
Etymology
From Middle English mickle, michel, mikel, mochel, muchel, mukel (“much; many; large, tall; great”), from Old English miċel, myċel (“big, large; great; much”), from Proto-Germanic *mikilaz (“great, large; many, much”), from Proto-Indo-European *méǵh₂s (“big, great”). The word is cognate with Faroese mikil (“large, great, much”), Icelandic mikill (“large in quantity or number; much; great”), Middle High German michel (“large, much”). Doublet of much and muckle. For the adverb and noun forms, compare Middle English muchel (“extensively, greatly, much”, adverb) and Middle English muchel (“large amount”, noun). The noun sense “a small amount” was due to the proverb many a little makes a mickle being incorrectly rendered as many a mickle makes a muckle, leading to mickle being thought to mean “a small quantity” and muckle to mean “a large quantity”, even though muckle is a variant of mickle and both mean “a large quantity”.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: mickle, miċel, *mikilaz, *méǵh₂s
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈmɪkəl/
- British English: /ˈmɪk(ə)l/
Usage
Inflected Forms
more mickle (comparative)
most mickle (superlative)
mickles (plural)
meikle (alternative)
michel (alternative)
muchell (alternative)