My love affair with “tiny words” began with smidgen and iota. Something about their contours resonated—not only were they fun to say but they carried with them an element of surprise and fancy. What exactly is a smidgen? Is it the same as a bit? A skosh? An iota? The more I thought about it, the more interested I became in words like these and others that describe things that are small, few, brief, faint, or dismissive. In other words, tiny.
 
The key, I think, lies in four features that define such words: their familiarity (they’re all around us), their specificity (each one is slightly different from any other), their antiquity (these are some of the oldest words in the English language), and, with many, their absurdity (how else to describe terms like bupkes and schtickel?)
 
So let’s look at dozens of these “tiny words,” each with a drawing, a quatrain (four-line poem), three or more quotations that illustrate the term in action, and a derivation.