morsel
/ˈmɔːs(ə)l
/noun
1A small piece or amount of food; a mouthful: Juliet pushed a morsel of toast into her mouth...
- Not a morsel of food passed my lips without the calorie value being carefully noted in my food diary.
- At this time, particularly in the rural areas, some underprivileged people would go from door to door asking for a morsel of food or some money.
- Not a morsel of food on her plate would be touched tonight.
Synonyms
mouthful, bite, nibble, bit, small piece, soupçon, taste, sample, spoonful, forkful, crumb, grain, particle, fragment, fraction, scrap, sliver, shred, pinch, drop, dollop, whit, atom, granule, segment, spot, modicum, gobbet;
titbit, bonne bouche
informal smidgen, smidge
Australian/New Zealand informal skerrick
1.1A small piece or amount: there was a morsel of consolation for the British team...
- Not since my first and final term of grad school have I taken a morsel of foreign information and extrapolated it into a moderately coherent essay.
- The press, in turn, enjoys that interplay, even as they're scrambling for morsels and crumbs of information from the guy.
- The captions offer only a morsel of background information and generally do not provide source information about the photographs.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French, diminutive of mors 'a bite', from Latin mors- 'bitten', from the verb mordere.
This is an English use of Old French morsel ‘a little bite’, from Latin mordere ‘to bite’.