All 20 Uses of

minute

in

Running in the Family

What images of family life they consumed in their minute jaws and took into their bodies no thicker than the pages they ate.
p. 136..1 (definition 1) *

minute = small

She belonged to a type of Ceylonese family whose women would take the minutest reaction from another and blow it up into a tremendously exciting tale, then later use it as an example of someone's strain of character.
p. 169..2 (definition 1)

minutest = smallest

Uses with a very common or rare meaning:

In ten minutes the garden will lie in a blaze of heat, frantic with noise and butterflies.†
p. 17..9 (definition 2)

When the bus arrived she herded herself in with the rest and, after ten minutes of standing in the aisle, found a seat where three could sit side by side.†
p. 42..3 (definition 2)

Night falls quickly during the five minute drive back to the house.†
p. 68..6 (definition 2)

And women and men with naked feet under the dinner table, and after the party the thunderstorm we walked through for five seconds from porch to car, thoroughly soaked and by the time we had driven ten minutes—without headlights which had been stolen that afternoon at the pool—we were dry just from the midnight heat inside the vehicle and the ghosts of steam cruising disorganized off the tarmac roads, and the man sleeping on the street who objected when I woke him each of us talking…†
p. 70..5 (definition 2)

After twenty minutes, with sun burning just the right side of our faces and bodies, climbing up and down the dunes, we are exhausted, feel drunk.†
p. 72..2 (definition 2)

Varieties of arsenic, juices from the centipede, scorpion, toad and glow-worm, jackal and "mungoose," ground blue peacock stones—these could stun a man into death in minutes.†
p. 81..8 (definition 2)

My grandmother waves him away and for fifteen minutes she sits alone with her sister, waiting for her to waken.†
p. 109..5 (definition 2)

After ten minutes she could stand it no longer, opened her purse, gave them each two rupees, and said, "Never, never play cards for love."†
p. 123..3 (definition 2)

Would step out of the river, dry in the sun for five minutes and climb back into the car among the shocked eyeballs of her companions, her huge handbag once more on her lap carrying four packs of cards, possibly a fish.†
p. 126..1 (definition 2)

The bats suddenly drifting like dark squadrons through the house—for never more than two minutes—arcing into the halls over the uncleared dining room table and out along the verandah where the parents would be sitting trying to capture the cricket scores on the BBC with a shortwave radio.†
p. 135..3 (definition 2)

After about ten minutes he still isn't over this bizarre motive for the visit.†
p. 157..3 (definition 2)

The gearshift was giving trouble, the horn was fading, and the engine heated up so fast we had to stop every twenty minutes to cool off and refill the radiator.†
p. 165..9 (definition 2)

For about ten minutes he sat in front of the house now fully aware that the car was empty but for his body, this corpse.†
p. 188..1 (definition 2)

Definitions:

(2) (meaning too common or rare to warrant focus)
Much more commonly, minute and minutes refer to a period of time lasting 60 seconds.

Less commonly, they refer to a measurement of angle where 60 minutes make up a single degree, and where a right angle has 90 degrees and a circle has 360 degrees.