trivial
from
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)
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"
from
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
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.]
[1913 Webster]
2. Ordinary; commonplace; trifling; vulgar.
[1913 Webster]
As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and
incapable of labor. --De Quincey.
[1913 Webster]
3. Of little worth or importance; inconsiderable; trifling;
petty; paltry; as, a trivial subject or affair.
[1913 Webster]
The trivial round, the common task. --Keble.
[1913 Webster]
4. Of or pertaining to the trivium.
[1913 Webster]
{Trivial name} (Nat. Hist.), the specific name.
[1913 Webster]
from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
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".
from
Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856)
TRIVIAL. Of small importance. It is a rule in equity that a demurrer will
lie to a bill on the ground of the triviality of the matter in dispute, as
being below the dignity of the court. 4 Bouv. Inst. n. 4237. See Hopk. R.
112; 4 John. Ch. 183; 4 Paige, 364.
from
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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