Little
Little is a surname in the English language. The name is ultimately derived from the Middle English littel, and the Old English lȳtel, which mean "little". In some cases the name was originally a nickname for a little man. In other cases, the name was used to distinguish the younger of two bearers of the same personal name. Early records of the name include: Litle, in 972; Litle, in about 1095; and le Lytle, in 1296. The surname has absorbed several non English-language surnames. For example, Little is sometimes a translation of the Irish Ó Beagáin, meaning "descendant of Beagán". Little can also be a translation of the French Petit and Lepetit, as well as other surnames in various languages with the same meaning ("little"), especially the German name Klein during WWII.
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Famous quotes containing the word little:
“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“We shall exchange our material thinking for something quite different, and we shall all be kin. We shall all be enfranchised, prohibition will prevail, many wrongs will be righted, vampires and grafters and slackers will be relegated to a class by themselves, stiff necks will limber up, hearts of stone will be changed to hearts of flesh, and little by little we shall begin to understand each other.”
—General Federation Of Women’s Clubs (GFWC)
“... when I awake in the middle of the night, since I knew not where I was, I did not even know at first who I was; I only had in the first simplicity the feeling of existing as it must quiver in an animal.... I spent one second above the centuries of civilization, and the confused glimpse of the gas lamps, then of the shirts with turned-down collars, recomposed, little by little, the original lines of my self.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)