2017, David Russell, Winston Patrick Mystery 2-Book Bundle[1], page 70:
"You are a little, little man," she proclaimed, staring obviously below my waist as she pronounced the second "little." It was almost disappointing. I'd heard that one before, but it still left a new scar each time.
Urania speaks with darken’d brow: ‘Thou pratest here where thou art least; This faith has many a purer priest, And many an abler voice than thou: […]’
1871 October 18, The One-eyed Philosopher [pseudonym], "Street Corners", in Judy: or the London serio-comic journal, volume 9, page 255 [2]:
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.
2004, Barry Miles, Zappa: A Biography, edition, published 2005, →ISBN, page 5:
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.
“The theatre was bought by the Croatian immigrants as so many immigrants came here in the ’30s and mostly for mining jobs, but in Schumacher itself it was called little Zagreb, and Zagreb is the capital city of Croatia. There were so many of them that they wanted to have their own little community, so they bought the theatre and they renovated it at that time, remodelled it and made it into a Croatian Hall,” she explained.
(derogatory)To imply that the inhabitants of the place have an insular attitude and are hostile to those they perceive as foreign.
2012, Steve Coogan, Comedian Steve Coogan on Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre:
He is the embodiment of Fleet Street bullying, using his newspaper to peddle his Little-England, curtain-twitching Alan Partridgesque view of the world, which manages to combine sanctimonious, pompous moralising and prurient, voyeuristic, judgmental obsession
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.
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
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 flavor.
Not at all.
I was speaking ill of Fred; little did I know that he was right behind me, listening in.
But then I had the [massive] flintlock by me for protection. ¶[…]The linen-press and a chest on the top of it formed, however, a very good gun-carriage; and, thus mounted, aim could be taken out of the window[…], 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.
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.
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.”
2018, Kelly Ann Gonzales, Through an Opaque Window:
He was there the night of Cristoph's party. All the littles were assigned to their bigs. Ian and Christoph had rushed the same fraternity. When they became upperclassmen, they both ended up on the board.
2019 April 1, Audrey Steinkamp, “Sororities pair new members with "bigs"”, in Yale Daily News[3]:
She added that the relationship between bigs and littles is "what each pair makes of it," and that a lot of the pairs often get dinner together and become close friends.
2022 September 27, Shreya Varrier, “Gamma Rho Lambda provides LGBTQIA+ community in greek life”, in Iowa State Daily[4]:
Some traditions of the chapter include lineages with bigs and littles, receiving of paddles from a big, and a national stroll, Wolsch-Gallia said.
People with [dissociative identity] disorder frequently have a younger personality among their distinctive personalities. However, it’s believed that the "little" may not be a separate personality. Instead, it may be a regressed version of the original personality.