Miniscule? Minuscule?

I used the word minuscule in the previous post here… and spell-checked the blog – not because I can’t spell but because I make typing errors, and I found that I had accidentally written ‘minuscule’ as ‘miniscule’. I was confused about which one was correct… surely ‘mini’ means very small? But surely the word is spelt with a ‘u’ as in ‘minus’?

I had to look it up to find which was correct and discovered that ‘minuscule’, as I thought, was the right way of spelling it, because it comes from the Latin, meaning ‘somewhat smaller’. There is a type-face for extremely small print, in fact it comes in five versions, Minuscule Six, Cinq, Quatre,Trois, and teeny-weeny, tiny-winy 2 point, Deux – how minuscule would that be?!

http://www.256tm.com/en/overview_1.htm

However because these days everyone knows that mini something is a very small something, the word gets written with an ‘i’ not a ‘u’… apparently 52% of the times the word is used it is written incorrectly! Even in printed newspapers and magazines where you might hope to have a decent proof-reader the incorrect spelling has been included. I get the feeling though, that gradually ‘miniscule’ will be used more and more widely, and gradually it will be accepted as an alternative spelling, and then as the spelling of the word with ‘minuscule’ become an obsolete form of the word.

Her is an interesting article about it:

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/minuscule-or-miniscule

When researching all this I came across quite a few web-sites which use the word incorrectly, even dictionary and thesaurus sites!

http://sentence.yourdictionary.com/miniscule

http://thesaurus.com/browse/miniscule+amount

http://www.scrabblefinder.com/word/miniscule/