Say the word: mote. It's short and quick, isn't it? The word corresponds to its meaning, which is something tiny: a speck of dust, a bit of fluff, a speckle of gold in the prospector's pan.
- Pronunciation: /məʊt/
- English description: (nontechnical usage) a tiny piece of anything
- Synonyms: particle
- Chinese Translation: 微粒(wei1 li4)
- Spanish Translation: la mota
- ORIGIN: We're not sure of the origin of the word mote, except that it is related to Germanic words meaning "sawdust or grit, tiny dust particles." We think of a mote as the tiniest of objects, but astronomer Carl Sagan demonstrates a different perspective when he looked at a photograph of Earth taken from a great distance by Voyager I and said, "We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
EXAMPLE SENTENCE:
- The smoky, carbon-smelling clouds rained down motes over the grass, the driveway, on my shoulders and in my hair.
- It was the spotlight of his eyes, those radiant beams, that gently drewmotes from the past out of me—and I loved this.
*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary.com