Definition of "littleness"
littleness
noun
countable and uncountable, plural littlenesses
The property of being little, smallness.
Quotations
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.
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. […] [Gulliver’s Travels], volume I, London: […] Benj[amin] Motte, […], part II (A Voyage to Brobdingnag), pages 306–307
Smallness of spirit; pettiness.
Quotations
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 littlenessTo make abridgments, and to draw to lessEven that nothing which at first we were;
1614, John Donne, To the Countess of Salisbury, lines 16–21
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.
1904, H. G. Wells, The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, Chapter 1, section I