Little vs Simple - What's the difference?
little | simple |
Small in size.
Insignificant, trivial.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-21, author=
, volume=189, issue=2, page=30, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly)
, title= Very young.
(of a sibling) Younger.
* 1871 October 18, The One-eyed Philosopher [pseudonym], "Street Corners", in Judy: or the London serio-comic journal , volume 9, page 255 [http://books.google.com/books?id=_B4oAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA255]:
* 2004 , Barry Miles, Zappa: A Biography , 2005 edition, ISBN 080214215X, page 5:
Small in amount or number, having few members.
Short in duration; brief.
Small in extent of views or sympathies; narrow; shallow; contracted; mean; illiberal; ungenerous.
* Tennyson
Not much.
:
*
*:Little disappointed, then, she turned attention to "Chat of the Social World," gossip which exercised potent fascination upon the girl's intelligence. She devoured with more avidity than she had her food those pretentiously phrased chronicles of the snobocracy […] distilling therefrom an acid envy that robbed her napoleon of all its savour.
Not at all.
:
*
*:But then I had the [massive] flintlock by me for protection. ¶, and a 'bead' could be drawn upon Molly, the dairymaid, kissing the fogger behind the hedge, little dreaming that the deadly tube was levelled at them.
*{{quote-news, year=2012, date=May 13, author=Alistair Magowan, work=BBC Sport
, title= Not much, only a little: only a small amount (of).
Uncomplicated; taken by itself, with nothing added.
*
*:“[…] We are engaged in a great work, a treatise on our river fortifications, perhaps? But since when did army officers afford the luxury of amanuenses in this simple republic?”
*2001 , Sydney I. Landau, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography , Cambridge University Press (ISBN 0-521-78512-X), page 167,
*:There is no simple way to define precisely a complex arrangement of parts, however homely the object may appear to be.
Without ornamentation; plain.
Free from duplicity; guileless, innocent, straightforward.
* (ca.1576-1634)
*:Full many fine men go upon my score, as simple as I stand here, and I trust them.
*(Lord Byron) (1788-1824)
*:Must thou trust Tradition's simple tongue?
*(Ralph Waldo Emerson) (1803-1882)
*:To be simple is to be great.
Undistinguished in social condition; of no special rank.
Trivial; insignificant.
*1485 , (Thomas Malory), (w, Le Morte d'Arthur) , Book X:
*:‘That was a symple cause,’ seyde Sir Trystram, ‘for to sle a good knyght for seyynge well by his maystir.’
Feeble-minded; foolish.
Structurally uncomplicated.
#(lb) Consisting of one single substance; uncompounded.
#(lb) Of a group: having no normal subgroup.
#(lb) Not compound, but possibly lobed.
#(lb) Consisting of a single individual or zooid; not compound.
#:
#(lb) Homogenous.
(lb) Mere; not other than; being only.
*(William Shakespeare) (1564-1616)
*:A medicinewhose simple touch / Is powerful to araise King Pepin.
(medicine) A preparation made from one plant, as opposed to something made from more than one plant.
*, II.37:
*:I know there are some simples , which in operation are moistening and some drying.
*Sir W. Temple
*:What virtue is in this remedy lies in the naked simple itself as it comes over from the Indies.
(obsolete) A term for a physician, derived from the medicinal term above.
(logic) A simple or atomic proposition.
(obsolete) Something not mixed or compounded.
*Shakespeare
*:compounded of many simples
(weaving) A drawloom.
(weaving) Part of the apparatus for raising the heddles of a drawloom.
(Roman Catholic) A feast which is not a double or a semidouble.
(transitive, intransitive, archaic) To gather simples, ie, medicinal herbs.
As a proper noun little
is .As an adjective simple is
uncomplicated; taken by itself, with nothing added.As a noun simple is
(medicine) a preparation made from one plant, as opposed to something made from more than one plant.As a verb simple is
(transitive|intransitive|archaic) to gather simples, ie, medicinal herbs.little
English
(wikipedia little)Adjective
Chico Harlan
Japan pockets the subsidy …, passage=Across Japan, technology companies and private investors are racing to install devices that until recently they had little interest in: solar panels. Massive solar parks are popping up as part of a rapid build-up that one developer likened to an "explosion."}}
- If you want to find Little' France, take any turning on the north side of Leicester square, and wander in a zigzag fashion Oxford Streetwards. The ' Little is rather smokier and more squalid than the Great France upon the other side of the Manche.
- In the forties, hurdy-gurdy men could still be heard in all those East Coast cities with strong Italian neighbourhoods: New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston. A visit to Baltimore's Little Italy at that time was like a trip to Italy itself.
- a little sleep
- The long-necked geese of the world that are ever hissing dispraise, / Because their natures are little .
Usage notes
Some authorities regard both littler' and '''littlest''' as non-standard. The OED says of the word little: "''the adjective has no recognized mode of comparison. The difficulty is commonly evaded by resort to a synonym (as smaller, smallest); some writers have ventured to employ the unrecognized forms littler, littlest, which are otherwise confined to dialect or imitations of childish or illiterate speech.''" The forms '''lesser''' and ' least are encountered in animal names such as lesser flamingo and least weasel.Antonyms
* (small) large, big * (young) big * (younger) bigAdverb
Sunderland 0-1 Man Utd, passage=But as United saw the game out, little did they know that, having looked likely to win their 13th Premier League title, it was City who turned the table to snatch glory from their arch-rivals' grasp.}}
Antonyms
* muchDeterminer
- There is little water left.
- We had very little to do.