brainlet

English

Etymology

brain +‎ -let

Noun

brainlet (plural brainlets)

1. A subcomponent of a brain or thinking system.
   • 2008, D. Brooklyn, The Black Son: What Makes You Tick, page 179:

     Let's call these five smaller brain units, brainlets: […] Each brainlet is found in a specific part of your thinking brain.

   • 2010, Meryl Runion, How to Restore Sanity to Our Political Conversations:

     The Prof brainlet is the IT brainlet. The Prof embraces pure logic without the “messiness” of emotion or instinct. To The Prof, everything is objective and impersonal.

2. (obsolete) The cerebellum.
3. (informal) A small brain; the brain of someone or something small or of someone who is not very intelligent.
   • 1858, Henry Mayhew, The Upper Rhine: The Scenery of Its Banks and the Manners of Its People:

     ...viz. the railway : an invention which is so thoroughly English that, even supposing it likely to have occurred to any slow Prussian brainlet, it would still have been impossible to have found any other nation (excepting perhaps America) with spirit or capital sufficient to have afforded the plan a trial.

   • 1884, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art:

     But a shade of bygone sorrow, Like a dream upon the morrow, Round his tiny brainlet clinging, Sets the wee cock ever singing,

   • 1890, Locomotive Firemen's Magazine - Volume 14, page 450:

     Then the blows came fast and heavy on his center-parted hair. Till his soft and tender brainlet was exposed unto the air—Ceased she not her work gymnastic till she sealed the masher's doom.

   • 1893, Fun - Volumes 57-58, page 27:

     . Ah! spurn me not, for even worse thoughts have besieged my busy brainlet !

   • 1897, The Blue and Gold, page 153:

     Freshie wants to turn ; he is literally yearning to turn, and he isn't going to take any chances on being put to help the carpenter saw wood, so he has figured it out in his little brainlet, that the best way to get a lathe is to pick one out and camp on it till the instructor gives him something to turn.

   • 1901, Charles King, Ray's Daughter: A Story of Manila, page 23:

     A whizzing spike, a chance shot that nearly grazed his nose, so dazzled his brainlet that the terrified creature doubled on his trail and came bounding back towards the train.

   • 1902, Turf, Field, and Farm - Volume 71, page 854:

     Mr. Lamb starts thither with a big wallet and little brainlet to do a “good lot of thinking;” despoiled of one and nearly so of the other, he succeeds in doing a “lot of good thinking—for experience teaches him “what might have been done.”

   • 1926, The Minneapolis Co-operator, page 10:

     I may be just a driver who makes a morning drive, but you can bet my brainlet is very much alive.

4. (by extension) A dolt; a fool; someone having a small brain.
   • 1859, Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, page 522:

     Still, we have in this country Whig writers—that is, party Whig writers, of the regular party guage, assuring the other little brainlets who believe their writings, that Ruskin is an author of equivalent genius to Jeremy Taylor's—a great man—an intellectual pinnacle—merely because he puts his hand to madnesses, because he abuses Protestantism, and thinks that Christians should not mind their own business, but all other people's businesses— exactly what a Whig of the latter-day school does in office, devising conspiracy bills for French people and sending advice to Germans— which they don't want, and don't take well;

   • 1905, Booth Tarkington, The conquest of Canaan: a novel, page 254:

     I think he told Claudine the same thing when they met, and convinced the tiny brainlet of his sincerity.