Minority

How to spell minority

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce minority

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does minority mean?

1. nounThe smaller number or part of a group, less than half of the whole.
2. nounA group of people set apart from the larger population by ethnicity, religion, language, or other shared characteristics.
3. nounThe state or period of being under the legal age of full responsibility.

Minority in a sentence

• Only a small minority of staff voted against the new policy.

• The council funds programmes that support every ethnic minority in the city.

• The trust managed his inheritance during his minority.

• The rebels remained in the minority throughout the negotiations.

• The law protects the rights of each religious minority.

• Contracts signed during a person's minority may not be enforceable.

Where does minority come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin minor, meaning 'smaller' or 'less', the comparative form of parvus, 'small'. Medieval Latin built the noun minoritas to name the condition of being the lesser part, and this passed into Old French as minorite before reaching English in the late 1500s. Its earliest English uses were legal and arithmetical: it described the state of being under legal age, and the smaller of two numbers or groups. Only later, particularly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, did it acquire its now-common social sense of a group set apart from the larger population by ethnicity, religion, or other characteristics. The same minor root sits openly inside 'minor', 'minus', and 'diminish', which is a useful reminder that the spelling keeps the single 'n' and the plain 'minor' stem before the '-ity' ending.

How the word is built

• minor (from Latin minor: smaller, lesser)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix denoting a state or quality)