trivial
tri·vial
adjective
(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”
- “trivial conversation”
- “commonplace prose”
of little substance or significance
- “a few superficial editorial changes”
- “only trivial objections”
Origin
PIE word *tréyes * From Latin triviālis (“appropriate to the street-corner, commonplace, vulgar”), from trivium (“place where three roads meet”). Compare trivium, trivia. * From the distinction between trivium (“the lower division of the liberal arts; grammar, logic and rhetoric”) and quadrivium (“the higher division of the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages, composed of geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music”).
Phrases
- trivial absolute value
- trivial functional dependency
- trivial group
- trivial name
- trivial solution
- trivial topology
Related words
Word family
WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.