smidgen

Etymology
Likely based on a variant of, , influenced by. Alternatively, from, a diminutive of. Compare Northumbrian dialectal English. , also, likely derives from English dialectal , , , , related to ; or possibly from , perhaps related to 🇨🇬, , 🇨🇬. If so, then cognate with.

Alternate etymology connects smidgeon with, though this is highly improbable considering the implied semantic shift that would have to have occurred.

Noun

 * 1) A very small quantity or amount.

Usage notes
Some cookbooks and manufacturers of kitchen measurement sets have attempted to define a smidgen for recipes. Anything between $1/25$ and $1/48$ of a teaspoon may be found, $1/32$ being perhaps the most commonly used. Other commonly used measures for small amounts include tad, dash, pinch, and drop. There seems to be some consensus of tad being the largest in this set and a smidgen being larger than a drop but smaller than a pinch.

Derived terms

 * a smidgen

Translations

 * Bulgarian:, малко количество
 * Chinese:
 * Mandarin:
 * Finnish:, , , hippunen
 * French:
 * German: ,
 * Irish: ruainnín
 * Japanese: ,
 * Korean:
 * Maori: ngarengare
 * Norwegian:
 * Bokmål: smule, dæsj
 * Polish:
 * Portuguese: pouquinho
 * Russian:, ,
 * Serbo-Croatian: komadić, djelić, ,
 * Swedish: ,
 * Welsh: mymryn