palaeography Palaeography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, UK) or paleography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, US) (ultimately from , , 'old', and , , 'to write') is the study and academic disciplin ...

, a minim is a short, vertical stroke used in handwriting. The word is derived from the

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

''minimum'', meaning ''least'' or ''smallest''. A minim is the basic stroke for the letters i, m, n, and u in

uncial Uncial is a majuscule script (written entirely in capital letters) commonly used from the 4th to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Uncial letters were used to write Greek and Latin, as well as Gothic, and are the current style for ...

script and later scripts deriving from it. Parts of other letters are based on minims as well: when a minim is extended above the line, it becomes an '' ascender'', as in the letters d and b, and when it is extended below the line, it becomes a ''

descender In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a grapheme that extends below the Baseline (typography), baseline of a typeface, font. For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal li ...

'', as in the letters p and q. It is a ''stem'' when it forms only part of a letter, such as r. Minims often have a connecting stroke which makes it clear that they form an m, n, etc.; however, in Gothic scripts, also known as especially in late examples, minims may connect to each other with only a hair line stroke making it difficult for modern readers to tell what letter is meant. A 13th-century example of this (also possibly double as a tongue-twister) is: ("the smallest mimes of the gods of snow do not wish at all in their life that the great duty of the defences of the wine be diminished"). In Gothic script this would look almost like a series of single strokes (this problem eventually led to a dotted and separate letters and ).

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English pe ...

scribes adopted a practice of replacing before , , or with in order to break up the sequence of minims. The resulting spellings have persisted into modern times in words such as ''come'', ''honey'', and ''love'', where an ''o'' stands for a short ''ŭ''. This is the reason

Richard Coates Richard Coates (born 16 April 1949, in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, and educated at Wintringham School) is an English linguist. He was professor of Linguistics (alternatively professor of Onomastics) at the University of the West of England, Bristo ...

gave, in his 1998 article, for 'LOndon' changing its spelling from . Gothic minims may have various decorations (essentially

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

s), from a simple initial headstroke, to large diamond-shaped ''finials'' at the top and bottom, such as in , the most decorated form of Gothic. , literally "textualis without feet", has minims with no finials at all, while has round finials.

References

{{reflist, refs= {{cite journal , last1=Meyer , first1=Wilhelm , title=Die Buchstaben-Verbindungen der sogenannten gothischen Schrift , lang=de , journal=Abhandlungen der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft zu Göttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse , series=Neue Folge , year=1897 , volume=I , issue=6 , pages=97 {{cite book , chapter-url=http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~hharley/PDFs/WordsBook/Chapter8b.pdf , title=A Linguistic Introduction to English Words , publisher=Blackwell , author=Harley, Heidi , year=2003 , chapter=Chapter 8. Accidents of history: English in flux , pages=293 {{cite book , title=Spell It Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling , publisher=Profile Books , author=Crystal, David , year=2012 , pages=107–108 , author-link=David Crystal Palaeography