Midgets

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Individuals, particularly in the context of performance or entertainment, who are notably smaller than average due to a medical condition or genetic factor
2. People who are significantly shorter than the typical height for adults, often categorized as having dwarfism
3. A term sometimes used in the past for those with distinct proportions, now considered outdated and potentially offensive in modern contexts

Etymology: "Midgets" is the plural of "midget," and the word's core is simply a tiny insect. The base is "midge," which in Old English was "mycge," meaning mosquito, and which later came to mean any small gnat or fly. Adding the diminutive suffix "-et," as in "piglet" or "islet," produced a word for something even smaller, and "midget" grew into a figurative term for any small thing. The word's roots reach back to Proto-Germanic and beyond, where the same stem gave Dutch "mug" and German "Mücke," both meaning mosquito or gnat. The shared ancestry shows that the insect sense is the oldest one, and the application to people came much later as a metaphor of smallness. The word's use for people is what makes it sensitive today. Its figurative sense of "small thing" was extended to small humans, and that usage is now considered outdated and potentially offensive, so most speakers choose other terms, such as "little people" or "people of short stature."

Synonyms: dwarfs