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/trˈɪviəl/ Listen

adjective

Trivial adj.

Found anywhere; common. (Obs.)

Ordinary; commonplace; trifling; vulgar. "As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and incapable of labor."

Of little worth or importance; inconsiderable; trifling; petty; paltry; as, a trivial subject or affair. "The trivial round, the common task."

Of or pertaining to the trivium.

Trivial name (Nat. Hist.), the specific name.

noun

Trivial n. One of the three liberal arts forming the trivium. (Obs.)

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Etymology of 'Trivial'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Trivial" Quotes from Famous Books

... a calamity doubly hard to bear when one looks back and sees by what a trivial chance it has come upon us, and how slight an effort would have averted it altogether; and Mr. Bultitude cursed his own stupidity as he stood there, rooted to the ground, and saw the hansom (a "patent safety" to him in sober earnest) drive off and ...

— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... recognize the sterling worth of his adversaries, and it was borne in upon him more and more that in this crisis he had a clever and beautiful woman to deal with, and what antagonist could be more powerful? He began to rearrange his thoughts upon this basis, passed in review all the seemingly trivial incidents with which Frida Mavrodin had been connected, and found many new meanings in them. The possibility that her influence might be paramount in Sturatzberg dawned upon him. Such a subtle power at work would explain many things, and the Ambassador determined to watch her ...

— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner

... all times natural; but at a distance from home the mind is doubly anxious for the details of what is going on there, and attaches an interest to particulars which, under other circumstances, it would consider as too trivial to be worthy of attention. During my stay on the Continent, I felt very forcibly the truth of Dr. Johnson's observation, "that it is difficult to conceive how man can exist without a newspaper." I was, however, for a considerable time, forced to be satisfied with the ...

— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard

... preserved. High prices have been offered for copies of the Hannibal journal containing them, but without success. The Post sketches were unsigned and have not been identified. It is likely they were trivial enough. His earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly crude and imitative, as the work of a boy—even a precocious boy—is likely to be. He was not especially precocious—not in literature. His literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along ...

— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... of a life so as to show what its individual and characteristic significance may have been in the midst of all the other human beings which surrounded it, he ought to know how to eliminate from among the numberless trivial incidents of daily life all which do not serve his end, and how to set in a special light all those which might have remained invisible to less clear-sighted observers, and which give his book caliber and value ...

— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

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