the.com/wavelet

means A small, short-lived wave or ripple — and in math and signal processing, a brief, localized wiggle used to analyze or compress data that changes abruptly.

from Straightforward compound: 'wave' plus the diminutive suffix '-let' (as in 'booklet' or 'droplet'), which traces back through French to Latin roots meaning 'small.' The physical sense (a little ripple on water) is old and plain; the mathematical sense is a 20th-century coinage, when researchers building on Fourier analysis needed a word for small, localized wave-forms that could zoom in on sudden signal changes — so they simply shrank 'wave' down to size.