Micro

How to spell micro

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce micro

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does micro mean?

1. adjectiveExtremely small, or operating on a tiny scale.

Micro in a sentence

• She runs a micro business from her spare room.

• The fund makes micro loans of just a few pounds to traders.

Where does micro come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is a clipping of longer terms built on the Greek root mikros, meaning 'small' or 'little'. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries scientists used micro- as a productive prefix to coin words like microscope (a small-seeing instrument) and microbe (a tiny living thing), and it later became a formal metric prefix denoting one millionth, as in microsecond. By the late twentieth century English speakers began snipping micro- away from its compounds to stand alone, first informally for a microcomputer in the early home-computing era, and then loosely as an adjective for anything done on a tiny scale, as in a micro business. The spelling stays faithful to the Greek mikros but renders the vowel as a long 'i' in English, which is the small trap here: it is micro with a single c, not 'mikro' or 'micrco'. The same root quietly powers everyday words such as microphone and microwave.

How the word is built

• micro- (from Greek mikros: small)