English keeps two lives under one spelling. Stressed on the first syllable, minute names a sixtieth of an hour, a sixtieth of a degree of arc, a vague short wait, and, usually in the plural, the official notes of a meeting. Stressed on the second syllable, it means extremely small, petty, or painstakingly exact. The origin of the word minute is therefore not a single borrowing with one job, but two related loans that share a Latin participle and then drift apart in sound and use.
What speakers mean now
In everyday English the time noun is the default. It is the unit on a clock face, the informal postponement (wait a minute), and the measure of how far something is in travel time (ten minutes down the road). Surveyors and astronomers still use the same word for an arcminute: one sixtieth of a degree. Secretaries and committees use minutes for the written record of what was said and decided. The adjective, by contrast, almost never refers to time. A minute crack is tiny; a minute inspection is close and detailed. Native speakers rarely confuse the two in speech, because the stress pattern does the sorting that spelling refuses to do.
Into Middle English
The time-and-angle noun is a late-fourteenth-century arrival. Dictionaries do not all name the same immediate source. Some take it from Old French minut or Middle French minute; the Oxford English Dictionary treats it as mixed, partly French and partly Latin (minuta, minutum, and the related adjective minutus). Medieval Latin minuta already covered a small portion, a unit of time, and a short written note. Middle English spellings include minute, mynute, and mynet. The earliest English evidence usually cited is from around 1384, in the early Wycliffite Bible.
That technical sense is sexagesimal, not decimal. Medieval Latin scholars spoke of a first small part: one sixtieth of a circle, later one sixtieth of an hour. The arithmetic itself is older. Babylonian astronomers divided circles and time by sixty, and Ptolemy’s Greek astronomy made that system standard in the medieval West. The Latin phrase is a later scholarly label; Ptolemy did not write in Latin. The next cut, a sixtieth of that first small part, was the second small part, which English shortened to second. From the same late-fourteenth-century period, English also used the noun loosely for any brief stretch of time. The clock’s minute hand is attested from 1726. Treating a minute as a distance you can cover in that time is later still, from the nineteenth century.
Small writing, not small clocks
A second noun sense grew from smallness as a property of a draft, not of an hour. By the mid-fifteenth century English had minute as a summary, memorandum, or rough copy. That use is usually traced to French minute and to the Latin idea of small writing: a compact working text, as opposed to a fair copy in a book hand. The familiar minutes of a meeting, almost always plural, are later, around the early eighteenth century. The verb to minute, to enter a remark in that record, is older, from the mid-sixteenth century.
The adjective is a separate loan, taken more directly from Latin minutus rather than through the French time-word. It appears in English in the mid-fifteenth century; one early dated witness is around 1440. The participle meant made small, from the verb minuere, to lessen or diminish. Early English use includes chopped small. By the late fifteenth century the word means very small in size or degree, and also of little importance. The sense of close precision, attention to tiny details, is later, from the 1680s. Stress and vowel quality split the pair: the everyday time word kept a first-syllable stress typical of older French loans; the adjective kept a more Latinate second-syllable stress. Same letters, two histories.
The verb behind the participle
Latin minutus is not a root by itself. It is the past participle of minuere. That verb sits with minor, minus, and minimus: smaller, less, and least. Historical dictionaries usually take the cluster back to a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as *mei-, with the sense small. Outside Latin, genuine relatives include Greek meion, less, and Germanic forms such as German minder, also less. English words on the Latin branch include diminish, minus, minor, mince, minuet, and minutia. French menu, originally a detailed or small list, is a doublet of the same participle: a sibling, not a descendant of the English time noun.
German Minute and Dutch minuut look as if they might be native cousins of the English clock word. They are not. Both were borrowed from French, as English was. The native Germanic relatives of minuere are the less family, not the unit of sixty seconds.
A fact the spelling hides
Meeting minutes are the takeaway worth keeping. They are not a count of sixty-second units, and they are not the adjective in disguise. They are small writing: a compressed record that once stood in contrast to a finished copy. The clock minute is a first cut of an hour or a degree. The adjective is the Latin participle used as an adjective, later stretched from tiny to petty to exact. One spelling now does all three jobs, but only the stress, and the old idea of something made small, still hold the pieces together.