littleness
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.44 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "For although the Queen had ordered a little Equipage of all things neceſſary while I was in her Service, yet my Ideas were wholly taken up with what I ſaw on every ſide of me, and winked at my own Littleneſs as People do at their own Faults."
- "His littleness didn't bother him, except when he needed to get something off the top shelf."
- "1757, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Part III, Sect. 21, pp. 161-162, Littleness, merely as such, has nothing contrary to the idea of beauty. The humming bird both in shape and colouring yields to none of the winged species, of which it is the least; and perhaps his beauty is enhanced by his smallness."
- "Court, city, church are all shops of smallwares; All having blown to sparks their noble fire, And drawn their sound gold ingot into wire; All trying by a love of littleness To make abridgments, and to draw to less Even that nothing which at first we were;"
- "So unlike what a man should be!—None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that disdain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life."
- "Tyler […] has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwarranted flattery. He was a politician of monumental littleness."
Etymology
From Middle English litelnes, litelnesse, from Old English lytelnysse, lȳtelnes, equivalent to little + -ness.