Proverb: Små gryter har også ører

When two adults in a Norwegian kitchen start to say something they would rather a child not repeat at kindergarten the next morning, one of them will tip their head toward the four-year-old at the table and murmur: «Små gryter har også ører.» "Little pots have ears too." It is the standard, gentle code for careful — the child is listening. Grammatically, this short line is a gift: in seven words it packs the single most irregular adjective in Norwegian (små, the plural of liten), two bare generic plurals (gryter, ører), a focus particle (også), and the irregular plural of øre. Read it whole, then take it apart.

The proverb

The image is a pun that survives translation. A gryte is a cooking pot, and the handles on the sides of an old cast-iron pot are literally called ører ("ears") in Norwegian — a pot has ears the way a needle has an eye. So the saying works on two levels at once: pots really do have "ears," and so, the metaphor goes, do small children. The English sibling is "little pitchers have big ears," where a jug's handle is the "ear." Used as a warning, it tells the other adult: lower your voice, change the subject, the little one is taking it all in.

små — the suppletive plural of liten

This is the heart of the page. The first word, små, is the plural form of the adjective liten ("little, small"). Most Norwegian adjectives form their plural and definite forms predictably by adding -e: stor → store, grønn → grønne, fin → fine. Liten does not. It is suppletive — its plural is a completely different root, små, with no shared letters at all. You cannot derive små from liten by any rule; you simply have to know it.

Here is the full, irregular paradigm, which is worth memorising as a block:

So liten has four visibly different stems — liten, lite, lille, små — where a regular adjective would have at most two (stor, store). The proverb uses the plural, and because the noun gryter is plural, the adjective must agree in the plural: små gryter, never "liten gryter" or "litena gryter."

For an English speaker this is less alien than it looks. English itself has good → better → best and go → went — words whose forms come from different roots. Liten → små is exactly the same phenomenon, just inside an adjective's plural rather than a comparative or a past tense. What feels new is only that Norwegian makes an adjective agree in number at all (English adjectives never change: "a little pot," "little pots").

The bare generic plurals: gryter and ører

Look at the two nouns: gryter ("pots") and ører ("ears"). Both stand bare — no article, no de ("the"), no noen ("some"). This is the bare generic plural, and it is the proverb's way of making a universal statement. Små gryter har også ører does not mean these particular little pots, or some little pots — it means little pots as a class, all of them, always. Norwegian, like English, uses the bare plural for generic, all-of-the-kind statements: Hunder bjeffer ("Dogs bark"), Barn vokser ("Children grow").

This is one of the few places where Norwegian's article system lines up neatly with English. In a specific statement you would mark definiteness — grytene ("the pots"), ørene ("the ears") — but for a timeless generalisation both languages drop the article and let the bare plural carry the "in general" meaning.

ører — the irregular plural of øre

The word øre ("ear") has an irregular plural. A regular neuter noun of this shape would often stay unchanged in the plural, but øre takes -r in the indefinite plural and -ene in the definite:

The trap is the body-part double life of this noun. Øre = "ear"; but spelled the same way, øre is also the smallest unit of Norwegian money (100 øre = 1 krone), and that word is unchanged in the plural: fem øre ("five øre" of money), not "fem ører." So ører means specifically ears, while the money sense keeps the bare form. Keep the diacritic exact: it is ø, not o — ore would be a different word entirely (and øre with no ø is simply misspelled).

også — the focus particle "too / also"

The little word også ("also, too") is doing precise work here. It is a focus particle: it adds gryter to a set the listener already has in mind — the big pots (adults) that obviously have ears. The sense is "little pots have ears as well (not just the big ones)." Drop også and the proverb still parses, but it loses its punch — the whole point is the too, the reminder that the small, easily-overlooked ones are listening just like the grown-ups.

Note the placement. In Norwegian, også normally sits after the finite verb when it modifies what follows: Små gryter har *også ører. It comes right before the element it adds — here, ører. Putting it at the very front (*Også små gryter har ører) shifts the focus onto små gryter themselves ("Even little pots have ears"), which is a subtly different emphasis. The proverb's word order, with også after har, focuses on the having of ears, the eavesdropping itself.

Watch the spelling: også is one word with å twice over (o-g-s-å). Splitting it into "og så" ("and then / and so") is a genuine and common error — og så is two separate words meaning something completely different.

The metaphor and its use

The metaphor is built on the pun we met earlier: a cooking pot literally has ører (handles = "ears"), and a child is a liten gryte — a "little pot" — that, surprisingly, has ears too. The force of the saying is that adults systematically underestimate how much small children take in. The child who seems absorbed in their drawing is in fact cataloguing every word about the divorce, the money worries, or the surprise party. So the proverb is, in practice, a parental warning, spoken adult-to-adult: switch topics, the small one is listening. It is affectionate, never harsh — there is a fondness in casting the child as a small pot among the big ones.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• små is the suppletive plural of liten — a completely different root, like English good/better or go/went. Memorise the block: liten — lite — lille/vesle — små.
• The adjective agrees with its plural noun: små gryter, never liten gryter (English adjectives never change, so this number agreement is the new piece).
• gryter and ører are bare generic plurals, stating a universal truth about all small children; use definite grytene/ørene only for specific, identifiable ones.
• ører is the irregular plural of øre ("ear", with ø); the money word øre keeps the bare form in the plural.
• også ("also/too") is one word with å twice; it focuses the eavesdropping. Don't split it into og så, and mind its placement.
• The proverb is a fond parental warning: the child, like a little pot, has ears — so mind what you say.