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.

   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, Thomas Hart Benton, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Chapter 11, p. 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.