MINORITY • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Minority

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/maɪnˈɔrəti/ /mənˈɔrəti/ Listen

noun

Minority n. (pl. minorities)

The state of being a minor, or under age.

State of being less or small. (Obs.)

The smaller number; opposed to majority; as, the minority must be ruled by the majority.

Those members of a legislature that belong to the political party which is in the minority in that institution; as, the bill will pass even if the minority are strongly opposed.

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Etymology of 'Minority'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Minority" Quotes from Famous Books

... bit purer or more refined for having passed through the well-cleansed teeth of a whole court. The inherent vulgarity is in having no other feeling on any subject than the crude, blind, headling, gregarious notion acquired by sympathy with the mixed multitude or with a fastidious minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth, and as indifferent to everything but their own frivolous and vexatious pretensions. The upper are not wiser than the lower orders because they resolve to differ from them. The fashionable have the advantage of the unfashionable in nothing but the ...

— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... turned by their success. They did not quite dare to repeal the law providing for a Constitutional Convention, but they undertook to repeal so much of it as required that the choice of delegates should be by secret ballot. The minority resisted this repeal with all their might. They alleged with great reason that it was not decent for the Legislature to repeal a provision which the people has expressly approved. But their resistance was in vain, and after a long and angry struggle which stirred the people of the Commonwealth ...

— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... be acquitted, and the attempt of the Legislature to dominate the Executive was defeated. Seven of the nineteen Senators voting 'Not guilty' were of the Republican party which had impeached the President, and it will be seen that a change of one vote in the minority would have carried the day for the revolutionists. So narrow was our escape from a peril which the founders of the Constitution had foreseen, and against which they had devised all the safeguards possible in the circumstances of the United ...

— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... a question of majority and minority. That settles everything in this country. You are a minority of one opposed to a large number of curious people that form a majority against you. That is the way I've heard the ...

— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... formed a very small minority of all the people, (not more than five or six percent,) and in order to win, they were forced to refuse all compromise. The old gods must be destroyed. For a short spell the emperor Julian, a lover of Greek wisdom, managed to save the pagan ...

— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

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