minim

plural minims · alternative minom · alternative minum

1. entertainmentA half note, drawn as a semibreve with a stem.
2. A unit of volume, in the Imperial and U.S. customary systems, ¹⁄₆₀ fluid drachm. Approximately equal to 1 drop, 62 μL or 0.9 grain (weight) of water.

   He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of the red tincture and added one of the powders.

   1886, Robert Louis Stephenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

3. A short vertical stroke used in handwriting.
4. Anything very minute; applied to animalcula and the like.

   the minims of existence

5. biologyThe smallest kind of worker in a leaf-cutter ant colony.
6. A little man or being; a dwarf.

   These as a line thir^([sic]) long dimension drew, Streaking the ground with sinuous trace; not all Minims of Nature; some of Serpent kinde Wondrous in length and corpulence […]

   1667, John Milton, “(please specify the page number)”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC

7. A small fish; a minnow.
8. A short poetical encomium.

   To make one minim of thy poor handmaid

   1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto X”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

plural Minims · plural Minimi

1. A member of a Roman Catholic religious order of friars founded by Saint Francis of Paola in fifteenth-century Italy.