menino

See also: meniño

Italian

Verb

menino

1. inflection of menare:
   1. third-person plural present subjunctive
   2. third-person plural imperative

Anagrams

• nomine

Portuguese

Um menino [1]

Meninos [2]

Alternative forms

• minino, meninho (archaic)

Etymology

Inherited from Old Galician-Portuguese meninho (the 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 Galician-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-).

Pronunciation

 

• (Brazil) IPA^(key): /meˈnĩ.nu/, /miˈnĩ.nu/

• (Brazil) IPA^(key): /meˈnĩ.nu/, /miˈnĩ.nu/
  • (Southern Brazil) IPA^(key): /meˈni.no/

• (Portugal) IPA^(key): /mɨˈni.nu/

• Rhymes: -inu, (Brazil) -ĩnu
• Hyphenation: me‧ni‧no

Noun

menino m (plural meninos, feminine menina, feminine plural meninas)

1. boy (a young male)
2. child (a young person)
3. 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

Spanish

Noun

menino m (plural meninos)

1. menin

Further reading

• “menino”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.7, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 2023 November 28