Let
$R$ be a commutative ring with identity, and let
$M$ be a unitary module over
$R$ . We call
$M$
$\text{H}$ -smaller (
$\text{HS}$ for short) if and only if
$M$ is infinite and
$\left| M/N \right|\,<\,\,\left| M \right|$ for every nonzero submodule
$N$ of
$M$ . After a brief introduction, we show that there exist nontrivial examples of HS modules of arbitrarily large cardinality over Noetherian and non-Noetherian domains. We then prove the following result: suppose
$M$ is faithful over
$R$ ,
$R$ is a domain (we will show that we can restrict to this case without loss of generality), and
$K$ is the quotient field of
$R$ . If
$M$ is
$\text{HS}$ over
$R$ , then
$R$ is
$\text{HS}$ as a module over itself,
$R\,\subseteq \,M\,\subseteq \,K$ , and there exists a generating set
$S$ for
$M$ over
$R$ with
$\left| S \right|\,<\,\left| R \right|$ . We use this result to generalize a problem posed by Kaplansky and conclude the paper by answering an open question on Jónsson modules.