minuscule

Sometimes the smallest things can make the difference. A jot. A tittle. An iota. The difference between “you” and “I.” No, not between you and me – between the letter u and the letter i.

If you are the type to pay attention to type, you probably know this little detail already. If I am to typecast you, you are a person of letters, not extraverted (and certainly not extroverted), and so not disposed to make room for someone who only has i’s for u. They may be inclined to minis, but for you they are merely a minus. Oh, you are absolutely down to the letters. Specifically the lower-case letters.

Back in the early 1700s in English – and earlier than that in French – the distinction was clear enough. It was all about character, specifically the character on the page: was it an uncial or a half-uncial, a large or small letter, capital or not, majuscule or minuscule? Is it I or is it merely i?

The words majuscule and minuscule came from Latin maiusculus and minusculus, adding to maior and minor (in modified form) the diminutive suffix -culus, which in this case made them mean not actually ‘small capital’ and ‘really little letter’ but just ‘somewhat larger’ and ‘somewhat smaller’ – specifically referring to letters. For added distinction, the stress on minuscule in English was on the second syllable: /mɪˈnʌskjuːl/. No one was likely to alter the spelling when it was said that way. And so it stayed until the later 1800s.

And then some writers started using minuscule to mean ‘small, insignificant’ in general. No one has ever (as far as I know) referred to houses or persons or paycheques as “majuscule” however capital-intensive they may have been, but all of those and many other things have been called “minuscule” when diminutive, miniature, minimal.

And, no doubt under the influence of the other min words, the pronunciation shifted. It may have started shifting sooner – after all, the stress on majuscule is also on the first syllable, so there’s a certain tidiness to matching that – but it was only in the 1960s that dictionaries started giving their imprimatur to putting the stress on the min.

One reason we know the stress was likely sometimes put on the first syllable before that, dictionaries be damned, is that the spelling miniscule first shows up in the late 1800s, around the same time as the word was coming into use as a general adjective. That spelling grew over the course of the 1900s, even catching up to minuscule by 1980 if we can believe Google Ngrams, but then subsiding before surging anew – though it still lags behind minuscule, for which we probably have spell checkers to thank.

I mean, really, though. Minus, as we say it, has a “long i”; minuscule sounds the same, until the last syllable, as minister. The power of analogy in language change is absolutely majuscule. And another way it affects this word is that we know that min means ‘small’ and we are used to added length being an intensification – if teeny-weeny is smaller than teeny and a thingumajig is fussier than a thing and longer strings of swearwords convey more asperity than shorter ones, why should not minuscule (which, by the way, has a distinct air of molecule about it) mean something extra small?

You could argue, certainly, that minuscule could be even smaller if it had, instead of that u, an i, classically the smallest letter in the alphabet (taken from the Greek iota, which also gives us jot as in jot and tittle). And you could also argue that since minuscule really means ‘somewhat small’ and refers to lower-case letters, the form miniscule could be the one that means ‘super-duper small’ – a useful distinction. But, even though dictionaries now accept both spellings, if you are the fussy type, you probably won’t. And that’s an important difference between u and i.