the.com/minute
a tidy little box of sixty seconds we never seem to have enough of
means a unit of time equal to sixty seconds, or one-sixtieth of an hour; (as a separate sense) extremely small or finely detailed.
from Both words trace to Latin minutus, 'made small,' from minuere, 'to lessen.' The time-unit sense comes through the medieval Latin phrase pars minuta prima, 'the first small part' — the first division of an hour into sixty — while the 'second' was pars minuta secunda, the second such division. The adjective meaning 'tiny' kept closer to the original Latin sense of smallness, which is why the same spelling splits into two pronunciations and two lives: the clock's MIN-it and the magnifying glass's my-NEWT.
- name origin
- Latin for first small part of an hour
- same spelling
- minute also means tiny, just pronounced differently
- heartbeats
- holds roughly 60 to 100 human heartbeats
- leap minute
- some minutes secretly contain 61 seconds
- angle too
- a minute also measures one-sixtieth of a degree
minute waltz — chopin's piano composition in d-flat major, approximately 60-90 seconds long
minute steak — thin-cut beef steak that cooks in 1-2 minutes per side