Trivial
adj, noun ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Any of the three liberal arts forming the trivium. obsolete
"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"
- 1 Ignorable; of little significance or value.
""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.""
- 2 Commonplace, ordinary.
"As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and incapable of labour."
- 3 Concerned with or involving trivia.
- 4 Relating to or designating the name of a species; specific as opposed to generic.
- 5 Of, relating to, or being the simplest possible case.
Show 4 more definitions
- 6 Of, relating to, or being the simplest possible case.; Containing only one element; having an underlying set which is a singleton.
- 7 Self-evident.
- 8 Pertaining to the trivium.
- 9 Indistinguishable in case of truth or falsity.
- 1 (informal) small and of little importance wordnet
- 2 concerned with trivialities wordnet
- 3 of little substance or significance wordnet
Example
More examples"Mr Yoshimoto taught us many trivial matters."
Etymology
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”).
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.