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trivial |
4 definitions found From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: 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.] 2. Ordinary; commonplace; trifling; vulgar. As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and incapable of labor. --De Quincey. 3. Of little worth or importance; inconsiderable; trifling; petty; paltry; as a trivial subject or affair. The trivial round, the common task. --Keble. 4. Of or pertaining to the trivium. {Trivial name} (Nat. Hist.), the specific name From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: Trivial \Triv"i*al\, n. One of the three liberal arts forming the trivium. [Obs.] --Skelton. Wood. From WordNet r 1.6 [wn]: trivial adj 1: (informal terms) 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}] 2: obvious and dull; "trivial conversation"; "commonplace prose" [syn: {banal}, {commonplace}] 3: of little substance or significance; "a few superficial editorial changes"; "only trivial objections" [syn: {superficial}] 4: concerned with trivialities; "a trivial young woman"; "a trivial mind" 5: not large enough to consider or notice [syn: {insignificant}] From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) [jargon]: 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".
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