The tiniest word that is recognized as a word — in the sense that there's an OED entry — is "fancyette."
It's a noun made out of the noun "fancy" — meaning fantasy or figment of imagination — and the ending "-ette" — meaning a small version of something. The OED defines it as "A little fancy" and says it's "Apparently an isolated use." The one example of the use — perhaps the only example — is:
a1834 S. T. Coleridge Marginalia in Blackwood's Edinb. Mag. (1882) Jan. 125 [Two Fancyettes, as Coleridge names them, at the end of a volume of Fichte].
So the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote marginalia in a magazine 140 years ago, and no one else has picked up this word. It's a wonder anyone ever saw it. Imagine scribbling your opinion in the margin of a magazine, adding an ending to an existing word, and having your passing fancy — your fancyette — preserved in the eminent dictionary. Just you, that one night, reading Fichte or whatever.
It's strange. How does that get to be a word? It's a wordette. See? I can make a word with a noun and an "-ette." It's easy to do. We do language tricks like that all the time. But how does it get into the OED? Is it a little joke? A jokette? ("Jokette" is not in the OED. "Wordette" is not in the OED.) Or is it something big? — massive reverence for Coleridge.
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