Tads

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Small amounts or portions of something usually in a quantity too small to be of significant importance
2. informal bits or pieces of an object or substance
3. a collection of minor items or details that collectively represent a larger whole

Etymology: "Tads" is the plural of "tad," which in the sense of a small amount is an American colloquialism first recorded in 1915. The noun's older meaning was quite different: in 1877 "tad" meant a young or small child, and that earlier sense is probably a shortened form of "tadpole." Anyone who has watched a tadpole wriggle through a pond will recognise the logic of calling a small, wiggling youngster by the same name. Nothing in the sources links the word's later sense of a small quantity directly to that earlier sense of a child, so the leap from "little person" to "little bit" is best treated as a change of meaning that the record shows only as a gap between the two dates. What is clear is that the word's modern use turns on the idea of smallness, which it carried from the start.

Synonyms: bits, small amounts, smidgens, pinches, scant amounts

Antonyms: lots, plenty, abundance