small [OE] A word recorded since around ad 700. In Old English it could refer to something slender or narrow as well as something more generally of less than usual size. From the 16th century small beer was a term for weaker beer, the sort that people drank for breakfast when water supplies were unsafe. In Shakespeare’s Othello Iago dismisses women as fit only to ‘chronicle small beer’, and from this sort of use developed the sense of something insignificant. Small potatoes started out as a phrase in American English, usually in the fuller form small potatoes and few in the hill—an expression used by Davy Crockett in 1836. The phrase small is beautiful, suggesting that something small-scale is better than a large-scale equivalent, comes from the title of a book by E. F. Schumacher, published in 1973.