Synonyms: Small

Diminutive is Latin, from the verb demenuere, meaning "to lessen." You can see the same root in diminish, or diminuendo if you're into classical music. Something diminutive is smaller than others of its kind: either a miniature replica like a scale model or just notably tiny.

In Latin, infinitesimus is an ordinal number, like first, second, third and so on: the infinity-eth number, as it were. So infinitesimal began its career in English as a mathematical term denoting an infinitely small amount, more than zero but too small to measure. That sense carried over into the language at large.

Jonathan Swift's satirical fantasy Gulliver's Travels, which he published in 1726, contains a scene that takes place on the fictional island of Lilliput. The inhabitants of this island, known as lilliputians, are six inches tall. So like diminutive, above, it's a good word to use when describing something that's a miniature version of something else. There are giants in the book, too: they're known as Brobdingnagians, which can be used in place of "huge."

If you need a microscope to see something, it's microscopic.

Minuscule comes from the Latin minusculus, meaning "less than." The minus you see in there is not a coincidence! It's most often used to refer to things that are smaller than other things. That became minuscule in French — where it's used to denote lower-case letters, retaining the comparative aspect of the Latin root — and then moved into English.

Not the unit of time, though it has the same root, minute is pronounced "my NEWT" and means "tiny." It's related to diminutive, above.

Negligere is Latin for "to neglect," so something negligible is so unimportant or tiny that it can easily be ignored without worry. Like infinitesimal, it refers to an amount of something so small that it effectively does not exist.

Petite is French for "small." It's often used in English to describe people or clothes. The "e" at the end denotes the feminine gender — French nouns have genders — so it's largely used to describe women and women's clothing. Petit is the masculine form, just as common in French but not often seen in English.

Picaillons was 18th-century French slang word for "money." In Occitan, the Renaissance-era language of Southern France, a picalhon was a regional coin, so called probably because the coins jangled in one's pocket; piquar meant "to ring" like a bell. Picaillons migrated to Louisiana along with French immigrants, and picayune became the local name for a Spanish coin and then later a nickel or similar low-value coin.

Scintilla is Latin for "spark," as in a tiny bit of fire that can ignite something and grow larger. It's most often used in English to describe the total absence of something — not even the tiniest bit — often in a legal context, as in "There isn't a scintilla of evidence that my client owns a wombat costume like the one in that surveillance video."

The Old French trufle, meaning "joke," "cheat," or "nonsense" came into Middle English around 1250. The "foolish nonsense" meaning proved durable, and over time trifle came to mean something unimportant or worthless: a child's toy or a silly distraction. In Britain, a trifle is also a dessert made from layers of sponge cake, custard, and whipped cream.