Meaning of Littleness | Babel Free

Definitions

1. The property of being little, smallness.
   countable, uncountable
2. Smallness of spirit; pettiness.
   countable, uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“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.”

“There is no doubt⟳ about what is not great, no race⟳ of men have⟳ such obvious littlenesses. They live⟳ in a narrow world so far as their human intercourse goes; their researches involve⟳ infinite attention and an almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much.”

CEFR level