menino
See also: meniño
Italian
Verb
menino
- inflection of menare:
- third-person plural present subjunctive
- third-person plural imperative
Anagrams
- nomine
Portuguese
Um menino [1]
Meninos [2]
Alternative forms
- minino (obsolete, eye dialect)
- meninho (archaic)
Etymology
Inherited from Old Portuguese meninno, menỹo (the expected palatal nasal survives in the Galician cognate meniño), of uncertain origin:
- From Latin minimus.
- From a Gallo-Romance language (cf. Catalan minyó (“boy”), French mignon (“cute”)).
- From meu ninno, with ninno being a borrowing from Old Spanish niño. The alveolar nasal may have arisen due to conflation with Old Portuguese neno, from Vulgar Latin *ninnus.
- From a pre-Roman substrate of Iberia, perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *mey- (“small”) (compare Middle Irish menn (“kid”), Middle Breton menn (“young goat”), Middle Welsh myn (“kid”), from Proto-Celtic *menno-)[1].
Cognate with Galician meniño.
Pronunciation
- Rhymes: -inu
- (Brazil) IPA(key): /meˈnĩ.nu/, /miˈnĩ.nu/
- (Southern Brazil) IPA(key): /meˈni.no/
- (Portugal) IPA(key): /mɨˈni.nu/
- Hyphenation: me‧ni‧no
Noun
menino m (plural meninos, feminine menina, feminine plural meninas)
- boy (a young male)
- child (a young person)
- child (offspring)
Synonyms
- garoto, rapaz, moço, miúdo (Portugal), guri (chiefly dialectal in South Brazil), piá (dialectal in Paraná, Brazil), catraio (colloquial)
Derived terms
- meninada
Related terms
- menina
- menininho
- meninão
Descendants
- Guinea-Bissau Creole: mininu
- Kabuverdianu: meninu
- → Spanish: menino, menina
- → French: menin
References
- Matasović, Ranko (2009) Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 9), Leiden: Brill, →ISBN, page 266
Spanish
Noun
menino m (plural meninos)
- menin
Further reading
- “menino”, in Diccionario de la lengua española, Vigésima tercera edición, Real Academia Española, 2014