littleness

From Middle English litelnes, litelnesse, from Old English lytelnysse, lȳtelnes, equivalent to little +‎ -ness.

littleness (countable and uncountable, plural littlenesses)

1. The property of being little, smallness.
   • 1726 October 28, [Jonathan Swift], “The King and Queen Make a Progress to the Frontiers. The Author Attends Them. The Manner in which He Leaves the Country Very Particularly Related. He Returns to England.”, in Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. , volume I, London: Benj Motte, , →OCLC, part II (A Voyage to Brobdingnag), pages 306–307:

     For although the Queen had ordered a little Equipage of all things neceſſary while I was in her Service, yet my Ideas were wholly taken up with what I ſaw on every ſide of me, and winked at my own Littleneſs as People do at their own Faults.

   His littleness didn't bother him, except when he needed to get something off the top shelf.

   • 1757, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Part III, Sect. 21, pp. 161-162,

     Littleness, merely as such, has nothing contrary to the idea of beauty. The humming bird both in shape and colouring yields to none of the winged species, of which it is the least; and perhaps his beauty is enhanced by his smallness.

2. Smallness of spirit; pettiness.
   • 1614, John Donne, To the Countess of Salisbury‎, lines 16–21:

     Court, city, church are all shops of smallwares;
     All having blown to sparks their noble fire,
     And drawn their sound gold ingot into wire;
     All trying by a love of littleness
     To make abridgments, and to draw to less
     Even that nothing which at first we were;

   • 1815, Jane Austen, Emma, volume III, chapter 10:

     So unlike what a man should be!—None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that disdain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life.

   • 1886, Theodore Roosevelt, chapter 11, in Thomas Hart Benton‎, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, page 239:

     Tyler […] has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwarranted flattery. He was a politician of monumental littleness.

   • 1904, H. G. Wells, The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth‎, Chapter 1, section I:

     There is no doubt about what is not great, no race of men have such obvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their human intercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and an almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much.