Other forms: minutes
A minute is sixty seconds, one sixtieth of an hour. Five minutes, in a minute, wait a minute.
In speech it is used loosely for any short time: I will be there in a minute, just a minute. Minutes in the plural also means the written record of a meeting — take the minutes, approve the minutes — and there the stress is the same. A minute is also a unit of angle, a sixtieth of a degree, used in navigation. And there is a separate word spelled the same, pronounced my-NEWT, meaning extremely small: minute quantities, in minute detail.
1nounminuteSixty seconds.~82%
“The train leaves in five minutes, so we have to run.”
2nounrecordThe written record of a meeting.~16%
“The minutes of the last meeting ran to nine pages.”
3adjectiveextremelyExtremely small.~2%
“The differences are minute and they matter enormously.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 24 sentences found in the wild and placed 24 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Medieval Latin pars minuta prima meant the first small part of an hour, and pars minuta secunda the second — which is exactly where minute and second come from. The tiny sense of minute is the same Latin word taken straight.
Medieval Latin
minūta — 60th of an hour; note
Old French
minute
Middle English
mynute
English, today
minute
From Middle English mynute, minute, mynet, from Old French minute, from Medieval Latin minūta (“60th of an hour; note”). a doublet of menu and menudo.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA