menino

👦
Meaning

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

Frequency

A2
Hyphenated as
me‧ni‧no
Gender
♂️ Masculine
Pronounced as (IPA)
/meˈnĩ.nu/
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-).

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