Trivial

How to spell trivial

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce trivial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does trivial mean?

1. adjectiveOf little value, importance, or seriousness; minor and easily dismissed.

Trivial in a sentence

• The manager refused to waste the meeting on such a trivial complaint.

• Compared with the lost contract, the parking fine seemed trivial.

Where does trivial come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin trivialis, which meant 'commonplace' or 'ordinary'. That adjective was built on trivium, the Latin word for a spot where three roads met, formed from tri- meaning 'three' and via meaning 'road' or 'way'. Such a junction was a busy public crossroads where ordinary people gathered to gossip, so anything trivialis was the sort of thing you could pick up at any street corner, common and unremarkable. The same trivium later named the lower three of the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric and logic), the basic studies, while the higher four formed the quadrivium. English took the word in during the late 1500s and kept the sense of 'slight' or 'of little importance'. The buried via also survives in everyday words such as 'voyage' and 'deviate', and remembering the 'three roads' image is a neat way to fix the single -i- in the middle that writers sometimes mis-double.

How the word is built

• tri- (three)
• vi- (from via: road)
• -al (adjective suffix); literally 'of the place where three roads meet', hence commonplace