trivial

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   concerned with trivialities

   a trivial young woman

2. 2
   adj

   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."

3. 3
   adj

   Commonplace, ordinary.

   As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and incapable of labour.

4. 4
   noun

   Any of the three liberal arts forming the trivium.

   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

5. 5
   adj

   (informal) small and of little importance

6. 6
   adj

   of little substance or significance

7. 7
   adj

   Concerned with or involving trivia.

8. 8
   adj

   Relating to or designating the name of a species; specific as opposed to generic.

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”).