TRIVIAL DEFINITIONS - 13 definitions found
trivial adj 1: (informal) small and of little importance; "a fiddling sum of money"; "a footling gesture"; "our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war"; "a little (or small) matter"; "a dispute over niggling details"; "limited to petty enterprises"; "piffling efforts"; "giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction" [syn: fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, piddling, piffling, petty, picayune, trivial] 2: of little substance or significance; "a few superficial editorial changes"; "only trivial objections" [syn: superficial, trivial] 3: concerned with trivialities; "a trivial young woman"; "a trivial mind" trivial triavil trivial early 15c. "of the trivium," from M.L. trivialis, from trivium "first three of the seven liberal arts," from L., lit. "place where three roads meet," from tri- "three" + via "road." The meaning "ordinary" (1589) and "insignificant" (1593) were in L. trivialis "commonplace, vulgar," originally "of or belonging to the crossroads." Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition (2003) trivial adjective Etymology: Latin trivialis found everywhere, commonplace, from trivium crossroads, from tri- + via way — more at way Date: 1589 1. commonplace, ordinary 2. a. of little worth or importance <a trivial objection> <trivial problems> b. relating to or being the mathematically simplest case; specifically characterized by having all variables equal to zero <a trivial solution to a linear equation> 3. specific 4 • trivialist noun • trivially adverb Oxford English Reference Dictionary
Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner\'s English Dictionary trivial If you describe something as trivial, you think that it is unimportant and not serious. The director tried to wave aside these issues as trivial details that could be settled later... ADJ English Explanatory Dictionary trivial ˈtrɪvɪəl adj. 1 of small value or importance; trifling (raised trivial objections). 2 (of a person) concerned only with trivial things. 3 archaic commonplace or humdrum (the trivial round of daily life). 4 Biol. & Chem. of a name: a popular; not scientific. b specific, as opposed to generic. 5 Math. giving rise to no difficulty or interest. øøtriviality n. (pl. -ies). trivially adv. trivialness n. [L trivialis commonplace f. trivium: see TRIVIUM] Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) Trivial \Triv"i*al\, a. [L. trivialis, properly, that is in, or belongs to, the crossroads or public streets; hence, that may be found everywhere, common, fr. trivium a place where three roads meet, a crossroad, the public street; tri- (see Tri-) + via a way: cf. F. trivial. See Voyage.] 1. Found anywhere; common. [Obs.] 2. Ordinary; commonplace; trifling; vulgar. As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and incapable of labor. --De Quincey. 3. Of little worth or importance; inconsiderable; trifling; petty; paltry; as, a trivial subject or affair. The trivial round, the common task. --Keble. 4. Of or pertaining to the trivium. Trivial name (Nat. Hist.), the specific name. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) Trivial \Triv"i*al\, n. One of the three liberal arts forming the trivium. [Obs.] --Skelton. Wood. Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) trivial adj. 1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speaker's time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly cretinous would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish `trivial' usually evaluates to `I've seen it before'). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See nontrivial, uninteresting. The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay "Los Alamos From Below" in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"), defined `trivial theorem' as "one that has already been proved". Soule\'s Dictionary of English Synonyms trivial a. 1. (Rare.) Common, ordinary, vulgar, common-place. 2. Trifling, petty, small, frivolous, slight, light, nugatory, paltry, unimportant, inconsiderable, insignificant, immaterial, of little value, of little consequence. Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 111 Moby Thesaurus words for "trivial": Mickey, NG, airy, ankle-deep, asinine, base, bickering, captious, casual, catchpenny, caviling, cheap, choplogic, cursory, deficient, depthless, empty, epidermal, equivocatory, evasive, fatuous, few, flimsy, foolish, footling, fribble, fribbling, frivolous, frothy, futile, good-for-naught, good-for-nothing, hairsplitting, hedging, idle, imperfect, inadequate, inane, incompetent, inconsequential, inconsiderable, insignificant, insufficient, jejune, junk, junky, knee-deep, light, little, logic-chopping, low, maladroit, meager, mean, measly, mediocre, miniature, minor, negligible, nit-picking, no great shakes, no-account, no-good, not comparable, not deep, not in it, not worth having, not worth mentioning, not worthwhile, nugacious, nugatory, on the surface, otiose, out of it, paltering, petty, picayune, picayunish, pussyfooting, quibbling, shabby, shallow, shallow-rooted, shoal, shoddy, shoestring, short, shuffling, silly, skin-deep, slender, slight, small, small-beer, superficial, surface, thin, tiny, trashy, trichoschistic, trifling, trite, unimportant, unprofound, unskillful, vacuous, vain, valueless, vapid, windy, worthless |
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