Noun: minus
| Singular | minus |
| Plural | minuses; minusses |
Sample Sentences
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On the third day a Master Barnard brings me up a slate full of plusses, minusses, x, y, z’s, and other letters of the alphabet, in a most amiable algebraical confusion. [1835 January, the Sub-Editor [i.e., Edward Howard], “The Life of a Sub-Editor”, in The Metropolitan Magazine, volume XII, number XLV, London: Saunders and Otley, […], page 427:]
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He valued Roderick’s friendship with the highest value he put on anything nowadays. Over the years they had assessed each other’s plusses and minusses and settled for the difference. [1989, A[udrey] L[ilian] Barker, The Woman Who Talked to Herself, London: Hutchinson, →ISBN, page 111:]
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As with LCR tout court the question is less to do with the plusses and minusses of the individual ideologies in themselves than in their relationship with their opposite numbers, in this case of Reason with Emotion. [2015, Peter Wyeth, “[Commentaries] Reason”, in The Matter of Vision: Affective Neurobiology & Cinema, New Barnet, Herts.: John Libbey Publishing Ltd; Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, →ISBN, page 113:]
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When Morrison mulls the pluses and minuses associated with rebuking Kelly for undermining the government’s public health messaging, the prime minister faces a genuine substantive dilemma, and that goes to the risks of amplification. [2021 February 2, Katharine Murphy, “Scott Morrison must heed the lesson of Donald Trump and slap down Craig Kelly”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 27 Apr 2021:]
Nouns inflected like minus
databus,
stage bus,
nonplus,
motor bus,
tour bus,
front-side bus,
microbus,
attrition bias,
portculles,
flue gas,
non-plus,
motorbus,
arquebus,
frontside bus,
poison gas,
schoolbus,
as,
commuter bus,
off-gas,
overplus, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
From Middle English mynus, from Latin minus, neuter form of minor, comparative form of parvus (“small, little”), from the Proto-Indo-European root *mey- (“few, small”). See: Latin Nouns '
minus'.