Un chin
A little bit, a drop, a touch — the Dominican small quantity, and one of the first words a visitor hears.
Related lesson: Dominican Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Dame un chin de agua, por favor.
Give me a drop of water, please.
Muévete un chin pallá que no quepo.
Shift over a bit — I don't fit.
Le falta un chinchín de sal.
It needs the tiniest pinch more salt.
What It Actually Means
Un chin is a small amount of anything: coffee, salt, money, patience, time. It covers the whole job of un poco and un poquito — un chin de azúcar, espérate un chin, muévete un chin — and Dominicans reach for it so automatically that it is usually the first non-textbook word a visitor consciously notices. Negated, it is absolute: ni un chin means not in the slightest. Doubled into chinchín, it shrinks again, to the pinch you add at the end of cooking.
Where It Comes From
Not settled, and worth saying so plainly. The most commonly cited account traces it to an Arawak/Taíno root surviving from before the conquest; a competing one points to a West African source arriving with the sugar economy. A third, folk version credits Chinese immigration, which is hard to square with the dates and is generally dismissed. Nobody has closed the question — treat any confident single answer you are given as local patriotism rather than etymology.
How Natives Use It
Everywhere, by everyone, in every register. This is the rare Dominican word with no edge to it at all: children say it, grandmothers say it, it turns up in radio adverts and in the mouth of the man weighing your plátanos. It attaches to nouns (un chin de arroz), to verbs (dale un chin) and to nothing at all — asked how much you want, un chin is a complete answer, usually with the thumb and forefinger held a centimetre apart.
Common Pitfall
It does not travel. Outside the island and its diaspora — including in most of Latin America — un chin will simply not be understood, so keep un poquito for elsewhere. And do not stretch it: a chin is genuinely small. Asking the man at the colmado for un chin of rice and expecting a kilo is a misunderstanding he will enjoy more than you.