Mite

How to spell mite

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mite

What does mite mean?

1. nounA minute arachnid that often lives in dust, food, or on animals.
2. nounA very small amount of money or a tiny contribution.

Mite in a sentence

• The allergist explained that the dust mite thrives in bedding and carpets.

• She could only spare a mite toward the office collection.

• A single cheese mite is almost too small to see without a lens.

• Every mite of savings helped them clear the debt.

Where does mite come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from Old English mite, the name for a tiny biting creature, and it shares its ancestry with the Old Dutch and Old High German words for the same minute pest. Scholars trace it back to a Germanic root that may be connected to the idea of 'cutting' or 'biting small', which fits a creature that nibbles at cheese, grain, and skin. By extension, because the animal was famously small, mite came to mean any very small thing, and in medieval Flanders it also named a coin of tiny value, which is why the Bible speaks of the widow giving her two mites. The spelling stayed short and simple, which is precisely the trap: it sounds identical to 'might', the verb and noun of power, so writers must keep the two apart by meaning, not by sound.

How the word is built

• mite (from Old English mite, a tiny biting insect); single root, no affixes

Words that sound like mite

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• might: Used to express a possibility or a tentative suggestion about what could happen or be true.