minionette
A size of type between nonpareil and minion, standardized as 6½-point.
minionette: a small typeface, mostly forgotten by design
A minionette is a unit of type measurement standardized at 6½ points, sitting between nonpareil (6 point) and minion (7 point) in the traditional metal type hierarchy. It exists almost entirely in historical printing references and specimen books; by the late twentieth century it had vanished from practical use, displaced by phototypesetting and digital font systems that render point sizes arbitrary rather than standardized.
The name follows the French diminutive pattern established by minion itself (originally meaning "dainty" or "delicate"). Type founders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created these intermediate sizes to fill gaps in their matrices and appeal to printers seeking finer gradations than the major steps allowed. A minionette might be cast in a limited run for a particular printer's order, or it might appear in a founder's catalog as a specialty offering. Unlike the major sizes, which came in multiple weights and decorative variants, minionette typically appears only as a regular roman in surviving type specimens.
Why it disappeared
The decline of minionette was not dramatic but inevitable. Hand-set metal type required cutting and casting individual punches and matrices for each size and style, making intermediate sizes economically marginal. When linotype and monotype machines dominated commercial work in the early twentieth century, they offered a fixed set of sizes tied to mechanical constraints; 6½ point had no place in that system. Digital typography in the 1980s onward made any point size technically possible, eliminating scarcity, but by then the historical type sizes had ceased to function as commercial categories.
A printer or book designer today will never encounter a minionette in active work. It survives in the historical record, in type founders' comprehensive catalogs, and in the occasional hand-set book printed for craft or antiquarian reasons. Knowing the term matters mainly for reading old typographic literature and understanding how nineteenth-century printers thought about the granularity of their materials.