Other forms: minors
Minor means small and not serious. A minor injury, a minor delay, a minor change to the wording — nothing that will hurt anybody or hold anything up.
In law, a minor is a person under the age at which the law treats you as an adult: alcohol is not sold to minors. Music uses it for one of the two main kinds of scale and chord, and a minor key sounds darker and sadder than a major one, which is why A minor is the shadowy cousin of C major. In American universities your minor is the smaller second subject you study beside your major, and it works as a verb there: she minored in Spanish. The opposite in every sense is major. And keep it apart from miner, the person who digs coal, which sounds exactly the same.
1adjectiveminorSmall in size or importance; not serious.
“She got away with a few minor cuts and a torn coat.”
2nounbelowA person who is below the legal age of an adult.
“The shop was fined for selling cigarettes to a minor.”
3adjectivebelongingBelonging to the kind of musical scale or key that sounds darker than a major one.
“The song shifts into a minor key for the last verse.”
4nounstudiedA second, smaller subject studied alongside your main one at university.
“Her major was biology and her minor was German.”
5verbstudyTo study a subject as your second subject at university.
“He minored in philosophy and never used it again.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: small, slight
Minor is Latin minor, 'lesser' — a word that also meant young, and a young person, which is where the legal minor comes from. It reached English twice over, straight from Latin and by way of Norman and Middle French. It is a doublet of minus, a relative of minister, and possibly a distant one of minnow.
Proto-Indo-European
*mey- (small)
Middle French
menor
Latin
minor — lesser; young; young person
Middle English
minor
English, today
minor
From Middle English minor, menor, menour, etc., from Latin minor (“lesser; young; young person”) both directly and via Norman - and Middle French menor, menour, etc. a doublet of minus but not mini-. Cognate with minister, minify, Minorca, Menshevik and possibly minnow. Compare Latin minimum and minuō, Old High German minniro, kw minow.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA