World Wide Words: Dandiprat

DANDIPRAT/ˈdændɪpræt/

A dwarf or small boy; an insignificant or contemptible person.

When the Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth wrote a letter to a friend in April 1795, she commented on her recent reading, “It is a scarce and very ingenious book; some of the phraseology is so much out of the present fashion, that it would make you smile: such as the synonym for a little man, a Dandiprat.”

She was somewhat premature: the word survives to be included in at least a few modern one-volume dictionaries because it does turn up from time to time in historical or fantasy fiction. In evidence of this, I place before you a quotation from Forward the Mage by Eric Flint and Richard Roach of 2002:

Who is so wise as to distinguish, with unerring precision, between a little man, a dwarf, a gnome, a midget, a shrimp, a runt, a pygmy, a Lilliputian, a chit, a fingerling, a pigwidgeon, a mite, a dandiprat, a micromorph, an homunculus, a dapperling, a small fry or someone with bad posture, weighted down with the cares of the world?

though this perhaps proves no more than that Messrs Flint and Roach possess a thesaurus with historical pretensions.

Nobody has the slightest idea where the word comes from. It first appears in the language in the early sixteenth century in the sense of a small coin current at the time, curiously worth 1½ pence, but then quickly develops its other senses.