trivial

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   Of little importance or value.

   Don't waste your time arguing over such trivial details.

2. 2
   adj

   Concerned with unimportant or shallow things.

   Their conversation was trivial and quickly forgotten.

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”).

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