Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Microcosm
/ˈmaɪkrəkɒzəm/noun
A small thing that contains, in miniature, the features of something much larger.
The Greek roots
μικρός
mikrós
small
κόσμος
kósmos
world, ordered whole
Literally: “little world”
The story of the word
μικρὸς κόσμος was a philosophers' phrase for the human being read as a scale model of the universe, four elements answering to four humours. Aristotle uses it in passing and the medieval Latin writers built it into a whole system of correspondences. The everyday modern sense, a school that is a microcosm of the country, keeps the structure of the idea and quietly drops the cosmology.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Medieval Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- c. 1200
Same family
macrocosmcosmoscosmeticmicroscope
In a sentence
The waiting room was a microcosm of the whole city, everyone in it and nobody talking.
A tide pool works as a microcosm of the reef.