Lesser

How to spell lesser

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lesser

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lesser mean?

1. adjectiveSmaller in size, amount, or importance than another thing being compared.

Lesser in a sentence

• The court convicted him of the lesser charge rather than the more serious one.

• Choosing the train was the lesser of two evils on a snowy morning.

Where does lesser come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Lesser is what grammarians call a double comparative: it takes the word 'less', which already carries comparative force, and adds the ending '-er' on top of it. The base goes back to Old English lǣssa and lǣs, meaning 'smaller' or 'fewer', words that had no surviving positive form (there is no plain adjective 'less-' the way 'small' pairs with 'smaller'). By the 1200s English speakers had begun treating 'less' as if it were an ordinary positive adjective and stacking the familiar '-er' suffix onto it, producing 'lesser' to mean 'smaller in size, importance, or degree'. The pattern mirrors other early doublings such as 'worser', but only 'lesser' survived into respectable standard English. A useful spelling note: the word ends in a plain '-er' and keeps the double 's' of 'less', which separates it cleanly from its legal homophone 'lessor', the person who grants a lease.

How the word is built

• less (Old English lǣssa: smaller)
• -er (comparative suffix)