minimal

1. 1
   adjective

   As small in amount, quantity, or degree as it could possibly be.

   The new rule had minimal impact on daily operations.

   Doctors said the procedure carries minimal risk for healthy patients.

   Similarminimum

   Oppositemaximal

   Note

   The everyday adjective, built from minimum with the suffix -al, sits most naturally before nouns of cost or consequence: minimal effort, minimal risk, minimal impact. Although it means the least possible, it still takes more minimal and most minimal, so those forms are best used sparingly. Its opposite is maximal, and minimum itself can serve as a near-synonym.

2. 2
   adjective

   Characterized by the use of simple forms and spare structures.

   Critics admired the artist's minimal canvases of flat, unbroken color.

   The architect favored a minimal interior with clean lines and no ornament.

   Similarminimalist, spare, austere, simple, stark

   Oppositeornate, elaborate, busy, fussy

   Note

   Art and design use the word for economy of form rather than smallness of amount: plain geometry, unbroken color, clean lines, no ornament. A minimal canvas or interior may be very large. What is reduced is the vocabulary of shapes and structures, not the size, and that separates it from the quantity sense, where minimal effort or risk simply means as little as possible.

3. 3
   adjective

   In music, built from short phrases that repeat over and over while changing little by little.

   The composer's minimal style develops tension from endlessly repeated motifs.

   The ensemble performed a minimal work whose patterns shifted almost imperceptibly.

   Similarminimalist

   Note

   Music gives the word a method rather than a look. Where the art sense means bareness, here it means building a piece from short phrases that repeat and shift by small degrees, so tension grows from patterns changing almost imperceptibly. A minimal work can therefore be long and busy. The economy lies in its material, not in how sparse it sounds.

4. 4
   adjective

   Describing an element of a collection such that no other element is greater, according to a given partial order.

   A finite partially ordered set always contains at least one minimal element.

   Mathematicians located every minimal element before mapping the structure of the lattice.

   Similarminimum

   Oppositemaximal

   Note

   Order theory gives the word a sharper edge than the everyday sense. In a partial order some elements cannot be compared at all, so a collection may hold several minimal elements with none of them below the others. Sometimes there is just one: ordered by inclusion, the subsets of the natural numbers have the empty set as their single minimal element. The matching term at the other end is maximal.

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