1930 H. E. Palmer Princ. Romanization 52 We may designate by the term monophone any phone of the first or second degrees of abstraction of which the concrete members are so similar in point of production and of acoustic effect even when observed by a competent observer, that it may be regarded as a minimal unit of pronunciation (i.e. practically insusceptible of sub-division).

1951 Word 7 5 The simple term seme identifies any minimal feature of meaning.

1964 R. A. Hall Introd. Ling. 15 Morphemes..are the minimal units which carry meaning.

1968 J. Lyons Introd. Theoret. Linguistics v. 202 This and that may occur as minimal free forms, and so are classified as words.

1991 Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 36 ii. 117 The minimal meaningful units, for languages which do have words, must be words (i.e., cannot be morphemes).

1939 Amer. Speech 14 122 Words can be distinguished by the minimal opposition of vowel nasality and [n].

1942 C. F. Hockett in Language 18 7 The term ‘contrastive pair’, meaning any pair between which there are differences in a context of similarity, any pair usable for the listing of features, is used here instead of the traditional term ‘minimal pair’.

1950 D. Jones Phoneme vi. 15 When a distinction between two sequences occurring in a language is such that any lesser degree of distinction would be inadequate for clearly differentiating words in that language, the distinction is termed a ‘minimal one’... Minimal distinctions are very commonly effected by the addition or subtraction of a phoneme.

1961 H. A. Gleason Introd. Descr. Ling. (ed. 2) i. 16 In calling bill and pill a minimal pair we assume that they differ by only one phoneme.

1992 P. Roach Introducing Phonetics 122 Vowels..may be ‘nasalized’..—this effect is phonemically contrastive in French, where we find minimal pairs très..and train.

1958 Listener 23 Oct. 647/2 Creating huge, minimal forms with the palette knife in a few colours.

1965 R. Wollheim in Arts Mag. Jan. 26 (title) Minimal art.

1967 C. Greenberg in E. Lucie-Smith Movements in Art since 1945 (1969) i. 13 The working out of this problem, whose solution seems to have arrived in the form of what is called Primary Structures, ABC, or Minimal Art.

1971 Rolling Stone 24 June 36/5 It remained only for minimal sculpture to come along, with its emphasis on the self-contained object (sometimes just a log, rock, or mound of dirt).

1987 M. Flanagan Trust v. 42 She had talked well to everyone: pop, op and minimal artists.

1998 Guardian (Nexis) 30 May 5 She studied philosophy and used to be a punk. She paints minimal pictures, then cuts them up or kneecaps them.

1965 R. Wollheim in Arts Mag. Jan. 26 Why could not Mallarmé, after an interval of time, have simply got up from his chair and produced the blank sheet of paper as the poem which he sat down to write?.. Such a gesture..would provide us with an extreme instance of what I call minimal art.

1989 Lit. Rev. Dec. 8/2 Readers of current American fiction will find this territory very familiar, as they will the minimal style.

1990 Dancing Times Oct. 35/2 The first item..reminded me in its experimental minimal style of the Fantasia semplice.

1999 R. T. Davies Queer as Folk: Scripts Episode 2. 38 (stage direct.) The foyer of a city-cenre PR company... Modern, minimal design.

1968 M. Nyman in Spectator 11 Oct. 519/1 I deduced a recipe for the successful ‘miminal-music’ happening.

1979 Musical Q. Jan. 106 ‘Minimal’ music..may not be minimal for the listener—only unpredictable.

1980 New Grove Dict. Music XVIII. 481/2 Systematic, or ‘minimal’, music may consist of extended reiterations of a motif or group of motifs... Alternatively, the element of repetition may be governed by a system.

1985 Radio Times 20 July 85/1 It is indeed hard to see how such a gigantic work..can be considered ‘minimal’ in any way.