small – English adjective declension

English adjective forms of small

Adjective: small

Comparison Forms

Synthetic

Comparativesmaller
Superlativesmallest

Perifrastic

Sample Sentences

  • A small serving of ice cream.
  • A small group.
  • Here, in the transept and choir, where the service was being held, one was conscious every moment of an increasing brightness; colours glowing vividly beneath the circular chandeliers, and the rows of small lights on the choristers' desks flashed and sparkled in front of the boys' faces, deep linen collars, and red neckbands. [1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter V, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:]
  • Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster. [2013 June 22, “Engineers of a different kind”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8841, archived from the original on 25 Nov 2020, page 70:]
  • The orbiter has been observing the moon since 2009, and its reflector is a smaller version of reflector panels placed on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 landings on the moon. Soviet lunar robotic landers sent in 1970 and 1973 also carried smaller reflectors. [2020 August 13, Ashley Strickland, “The reason we’re shooting laser beams between Earth and the moon”, in CNN:]
  • Guinness World Record confirmed the micro-cube as the world’s smallest rotating puzzle cube in August. [2024 October 4, Chris Lau and Nodoka Katsura, “This is the world’s smallest Rubik’s Cube. And it actually works”, in CNN:]
  • The bullies had succeeded in making him feel small.
  • For all the times that you made me feel small / I fell in love, now I feel nothing at all [2015, Justin Bieber, Love Yourself:]
  • (of genitals)
  • Though over six feet tall, the man was very small and ashamed to undress.
  • Remember when the children were small?
  • "I've got catholic tastes. Catholic with a small "c", of course." [1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 584:]
  • A true delineation of the smallest man is capable of interesting the greatest man. [1851, Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling:]
  • a small space of time
  • small science
  • I'll have a small coffee, thanks.

Adjectives inflected like small

sallow, smooth, slight, sleigh, sordid, somber, shweet, shrill, shrewd, yellow, yaller, hard knock, DRY, Greek, cut short, unquiet, unclean, indiscreet, chipper, straicht, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)

Etymology

1. From Middle English smal, smale, small, smalle, smel, smæl, from Old English smæl (“narrow, slim; slender; fine; small; quiet”), from Proto-West Germanic *smal, from Proto-Germanic *smalaz (“small”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)mal- (“small; little”).
2. Cognates
3. Cognate with Scots smaw (“small; minor”), Yola smaale, small (“small”), North Frisian smaal, smeel, smääl (“narrow”), Saterland Frisian smäl (“narrow”), West Frisian smel (“narrow”), Alemannic German schmaal (“narrow”), Bavarian schmoi (“narrow; slender”), Dutch smal (“narrow; small”), German schmal (“narrow; slender”), Low German small (“narrow; slender, small”), Luxembourgish schmuel (“narrow”), Vilamovian śmoł, šmoł (“narrow”), Yiddish שמאָל (shmol, “narrow”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish smal (“narrow; slim”), Gothic 𐍃𐌼𐌰𐌻𐌹𐍃𐍄𐍃 (smalists, “smallest”); also Latin malus (“bad, distressing, nasty; evil, mischievous, wicked; destructive, hurtful, noxious; abusive, hostile, unkind”), Belarusian малы́ (malý, “small”), Bulgarian and Macedonian мал (mal, “small; minor”), Czech and Slovak malý (“small”), Polish mały (“small; little; humble; short”), Russian ма́лый (mályj, “small; short”), Serbo-Croatian ма̑л, mȃl (“small”), Ukrainian мали́й (malýj, “small”). See: Dutch Adjectives 'smal', German Adjectives 'schmal', Gothic Adjectives '𐍃𐌼𐌰𐌻𐌹𐍃𐍄𐍃', Latin Adjectives 'malus', Polish Adjectives 'mały'.

Verbs referencing "small"

Dutch Adjectives smal, Swedish Adjectives smal, German Adjectives schmal.