the.com/pygmy shrew

means One of the smallest mammals on Earth by mass, a tiny insect-eating shrew that must eat almost constantly just to stay alive.

from 'Shrew' traces back to Old English 'scrēawa', a word for the small mouse-like animal, which also spawned the verb 'to shrew' and later 'shrewd' — because the creature was wrongly believed in folk tradition to have a venomous, injurious bite that could 'shrew' or curse livestock. 'Pygmy' comes from Greek 'pygmaios', meaning 'dwarfish,' literally tied to 'pygmē,' a unit of measure roughly the length of a forearm — the Greeks used it to describe a legendary race of small people, and the word later became a general label for anything diminutive, including, eventually, this frantic, rice-grain-hearted little mammal.