Tiniest

How to spell tiniest

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tiniest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tiniest mean?

1. adjectiveSmallest in size or amount of all those being considered.

Tiniest in a sentence

• The jeweller examined the tiniest scratch on the gold band.

• Even the tiniest error in the spreadsheet threw off the totals.

Where does tiniest come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

This is the superlative of 'tiny', an adjective whose origins are genuinely murky. 'Tiny' first appears in English in the late 1500s and seems to have grown out of an older noun 'tine', meaning a very small amount or a little bit, as in the phrase 'a little tine'. That noun itself is of uncertain background, and scholars cannot point to a single confident source word, which is why dictionaries label it as origin unknown. Once 'tiny' settled into the language, it took the regular comparative and superlative endings, giving 'tinier' and 'tiniest'. The spelling trap lives entirely in that ending: because the base word ends in a consonant plus 'y', the 'y' switches to 'i' before '-est', producing 'tiniest' rather than the wrong-looking 'tinyest'.

How the word is built

• tini- (from tiny, with y changed to i)
• -est (superlative suffix)