Trivial Meaning
/ˈtɹɪv.i.əl/Definition, CEFR level B2, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
adjIgnorable; of little significance or value.
adjCommonplace, ordinary.
Sentence Examples
Mr Yoshimoto taught us many trivial matters.
Such a trivial thing is out of the question.
Synonyms & Antonyms
Synonyms:
Antonyms:
CEFR Practice Quiz
The professor ignored the ____ details and focused on the main idea.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Please do not waste your time worrying about ____ matters that do not really affect the overall success of the project today.
Word Origin & History
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”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
""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:
"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:
"As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and incapable of labour."
— 1842, Thomas De Quincey, “Cicero”, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine:
"Tryuyals, & quatryuyals, ſo ſore now they appayre
That Parrot the Popagay, hath pytye to beholde
How the reſt of good lernyng, is roufled vp & trold"
— c. 1521, John Skelton, Speke Parott:
"St. Edmund was bred in this University in the Trivials and Quadrivials till he was Professor of Arts"
— 1691, [Anthony Wood], Athenæ Oxonienses. An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops who have had Their Education in the Most Ancient and Famous University of Oxford from the Fifteenth Year of King Henry the Seventh, Dom. 1500, to the End of the Year 1690. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: […] Tho[mas] Bennet […]:
Explore More B2 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The professor ignored the ____ details and focused on the main idea.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Please do not waste your time worrying about ____ matters that do not really affect the overall success of the project today.