punctilious
English
Etymology
From punctilio (“fine point in exactness of conduct”) + -ous.
Pronunciation
Adjective
punctilious (comparative more punctilious, superlative most punctilious)
- Strictly attentive to detail; meticulous or fastidious, particularly to codes or conventions.
- Synonyms: see Thesaurus:meticulous
- With a punctilious slap of the gloves, the duel was now inevitable.
- Precise or scrupulous; finicky or nitpicky.
- Synonyms: finicky, nitpicky, precise; see also Thesaurus:meticulous
- 2009, Ronnie Cann, Ruth Kempson and Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Semantics: an introduction to meaning in language
- Of course, humans do not treat time in such a punctilious fashion.
- 2017, Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Pantheon Books, page 103:
- Every editor at Merriam-Webster deals with the Black Books at many points during their tenure. The Black Books are the in-house set of rules for writing a dictionary (commonly called a style guide) as conceived and written in punctilious detail by the former editor in chief Philip Babcock Gove, for the creation of Webster’s Third.
Derived terms
Related terms
Translations
strictly attentive to detail
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precise
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked
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Further reading
- “punctilious”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.