Say the word: mote. It's short and quick, isn't it? The word corresponds to its meaning, which is something tiny: a speck of dust, a bit of fluff, a speckle of gold in the prospector's pan.
We're not sure of the origin of the word mote is not known, except that it is related to Germanic words meaning sawdust or grit, tiny dust particles. We think of a mote as the tiniest of objects, but astronomer Carl Sagan put it into a different perspective when he looked at a photograph of Earth taken from a great distance by Voyager I and said, "We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
