Miniature

How to spell miniature

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce miniature

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does miniature mean?

1. adjectiveVery small of its kind; made or existing on a much reduced scale.
2. nounA very small painting, model, or representation of something.

Miniature in a sentence

• adjective

  The hotel stocked the fridge with miniature bottles of gin.

• noun

  The gallery displayed a delicate portrait miniature painted on ivory.

• adjective

  He collects miniature railway models and displays them in a glass cabinet.

• noun

  She kept a miniature of her grandmother in a locket.

Where does miniature come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word comes from the Italian miniatura, which described the small painted illustrations and decorated initials found in medieval manuscripts. That Italian noun was built on the Latin verb miniare, meaning 'to colour with red lead', because scribes used a bright pigment called minium (red lead, or cinnabar) to pick out letters and pictures. Surprisingly, the original idea had nothing to do with smallness at all; it was about the red paint. Because such manuscript paintings were necessarily tiny, the word drifted in the 1500s and 1600s to mean 'a very small portrait' and then simply 'small-scale', a shift helped along by people wrongly linking it to the Latin minor, meaning 'less'. English borrowed it in the early 1600s, and that hidden second 'i' in the 'mini-a-ture' middle, the very letter people drop, is the fossil of the original red-lead syllable.

How the word is built

• mini- (from Latin miniare: to colour with red lead)
• -ature (noun suffix); the modern 'small' sense was reinforced by association with Latin minor 'less'