You can hold one picture for this whole word: someone about as tall as a fist. The Greek root really is the word for a fist, and the old stories used it for a people that small. Every later use is that picture moved somewhere new — onto real people, onto a kind of animal, and onto how much a person counts in their field. Where the picture lands matters a great deal, though. On an animal name it is a neutral size label. On a person it is either a dated term that people object to, or a straight insult.
From the word’s history
Recorded as coming from Latin Pygmaeī, from Ancient Greek pugmaîos, a member of a legendary race of dwarfs, built on pugmḗ, a fist — that is, as tall as a fist. The sources also note it was first used of actual living peoples only in the 19th century.
來源記載它來自拉丁文 Pygmaeī，再往前是古希臘文 πυγμαῖος（傳說中小矮人族的一員），而這個字建立在 πυγμή（拳頭）之上，也就是「只有一個拳頭那麼高」。來源同時註明，一直到十九世紀，這個字才被拿去指真實存在的族群。
Wiktionary (kaikki extract, source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:590088527)
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