different between littleness vs meanness

English

Etymology

From Middle English litelnes, litelnesse, from Old English lytelnysse, l?telnes, equivalent to little +? -ness.

Noun

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,^[1]

     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,^[2]

     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;

   • 1886, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Hart Benton, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Chapter 11, p. 239,^[3]

     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,^[4]

     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.

Translations

English

Etymology

mean +? -ness

Noun

meanness (countable and uncountable, plural meannesses)

1. (uncountable) The condition, or quality, of being mean (any of its definitions)

   This figure is of a later date, by the meanness of the workmanship. Addison

2. (countable) A mean act.
   • 1908, The World's Work (volume 16, page 10497)

     There are enough meannesses in everyone — ourselves included — to make for us a contemptible world, if we select the meannesses and let our minds dwell upon them.

Antonyms

• nobility
• nobleness

Translations

References

• meanness in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.