scintilla
Other forms: scintillas
It might take more than a scintilla of English vocabulary knowledge to know that scintilla means a tiny bit of something.
Scintilla is a long word for describing a tiny thing. It comes sandwiched between the words a and of in phrases like “a scintilla of doubt” or “not a single scintilla of evidence.” If you’re uncertain of the pronunciation, remember: it rhymes with chinchilla and the c is silent, just like in science. Similar words you can use to talk about tiny bits of something are iota, smidgen, speck, and whit.
-
a tiny or scarcely detectable amounttype of:small indefinite amount, small indefinite quantityan indefinite quantity that is below average size or magnitude
-
a sparkling glittering particletype of:particle, subatomic particlea body having finite mass and internal structure but negligible dimensions
- MLA
- APA
- Chicago
Vocabulary lists containing scintilla
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
Whether you're describing a molecule, a kitten, or the number of pickled spiders you're willing to eat, synonyms for "small" can be extremely useful. For more synonym lists, explore our Say What You Mean resources.
In this collection of interrelated narratives, Ray Bradbury imagines the gradual colonization of Mars by earthlings.