pedantic

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Victim: now you're being truly pedantic which isn't doing your argument any favors ... to me, you sound more post-modern than anything, which is ironic.

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Definitions (4)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (2)

  1. adjective Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules: a pedantic attention to details.
  2. Syntax Note
    Synonyms: pedantic, academic, bookish, donnish, scholastic
    These adjectives mean marked by a narrow, often tiresome focus on or display of learning and especially its trivial aspects: a pedantic writing style; an academic insistence on precision; a bookish vocabulary; donnish refinement of speech; scholastic and excessively subtle reasoning.

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Examples (50)

  • He decided that sounded pedantic, a little too pat, a stuffed-shirt sort of an answer. —  178 - The Swooning Lady
  • Wood's essay on Updike conducts a critique of the novelist's religious complacency that feels like an argument in a Cambridge common room -- pedantic, persnickety and finally rather bloodless. —  Powell's Books: Overview
  • Yellow_Card: now you're being truly pedantic which isn't doing your argument any favors ... to me, you sound more post - "Ocean Avenue" than anything, which is ironic. —  Punknews.org
  • Victim: now you're being truly pedantic which isn't doing your argument any favors ... to me, you sound more post-modern than anything, which is ironic. —  Punknews.org
  • Because that's sort of pedantic, and none of the rest was pedantic. —  Seattlest
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Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

Used in the same context Used in the Same Context

pompous ·  tiresome ·  narrow-minded ·  frivolous ·  stilted ·  boastful ·  absurd ·  trivial ·  ludicrous ·  dogmatic ·  whimsical ·  puerile
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (1)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. from pedant + -ic. Cf. D. G. pedantisch = Swedish Danish pedantisk.
 

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/pəˈdæntɪk/
by American Heritage

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