small or little: low on any scale, whether in size, in standing, or in amount of time.
This is the ordinary word for small, the opposite of μέγας, the word for great or large. Its core is plain, but it stretches across several kinds of smallness, and the kind shifts with what is being measured. It can describe a thing that is small in size, like a mustard seed or a pinch of yeast. It can describe a person who is small in standing, the lowly and unimportant rather than the powerful, which is why the Gospels can call humble believers "little ones" and the New Testament pairs "small and great" to mean everyone from the least to the most prominent.
The neuter form is also used like an adverb, and there it most often measures time: "a little while." Jesus uses it this way over and over on the night before his death, telling his disciples that in a little while they will not see him, and again in a little while they will. The same adverb can instead measure extent or degree, as when Jesus goes "a little" farther to pray, or when Paul asks his readers to bear with him "a little."
All of these are the one word doing what size words do in many languages: a literal smallness reaches out to cover rank, quantity, and stretches of time. The reader's task is simply to notice which kind of smallness a given verse has in view.