Adjective: trivial
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more trivial |
| Superlative | most trivial |
Sample Sentences
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"All which details, I have no doubt, Jones, who reads this book at his Club, will pronounce to be excessively foolish, trivial, twaddling, and ultra-sentimental." [1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 16, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC:]
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In fact, the influence of signage in a certain area may exist anywhere on a continuum from profoundly effective to utterly trivial or completely insignificant, irrespective of the intent motivating the signs. [2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 11:]
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As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and incapable of labour. [1842, Thomas De Quincey, “Cicero”, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine:]
Adjectives inflected like trivial
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
1. PIE word
2. *tréyes
3. * From Latin triviālis (“appropriate to the street-corner, commonplace, vulgar”), from trivium (“place where three roads meet”). Compare trivium, trivia.
4. * 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”). See: Latin Adjectives '
triviālis'.
Verbs referencing "trivial"
Finnish Adjectives
triviaali.