miniature [E18th] When monks and scribes decorated the initial letters of chapters in illuminated manuscripts, they often painted small images. It was not the smallness that miniature originally referred to, though, but the colour of the paint used for the capital letters. Latin minium was a word for the red pigment *vermilion. It is the source of Italian miniatura, which originally referred to the illuminating of manuscript letters but came to be used for small portraits, and gave us miniature in the late 16th century, with the adjective meaning ‘very small’ appearing in the early 18th century. Mini is an abbreviation of miniature that became popular in the early 20th century. The Mini car, originally known as the Mini Minor, was launched by the British Motor Corporation in 1959, and became an iconic vehicle of the swinging 60s that was immortalized in the film The Italian Job (1969). The other mini of the 60s was the miniskirt, which symbolized the decade’s sexual permissiveness. The French fashion designer André Courrèges (1923–2016) is credited with its invention, although it was popularized by Mary Quant. The word is first recorded in 1965, the year when the fashion was first seen.