Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Overparticular about trivial details; fastidious.
  • adjective Snobbish; pretentious.
  • adjective Requiring strict attention to detail; demanding.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective colloq. Finicky or fussy; demanding attention to petty details; -- of people.
  • adjective colloq. snobbish; behaving aloofly.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective US Fastidious or fussy.
  • adjective Obsessive about mundane details, demanding for precision.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective characterized by excessive precision and attention to trivial details
  • adjective (used colloquially) overly conceited or arrogant

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Alteration of pernickety.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Alteration of pernickety

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Examples

Comments

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  • See pernickety.

    August 16, 2007

  • One of those non-onomatopoeias that sounds exactly like what it means.

    October 14, 2007

  • Yes. I can see myself in the future - and I still can remember this word vividly - because perse means ass|buttocks in Finnish. So, s-version it is, for me.

    March 1, 2009

  • "For a persnickety bureaucrat such as Flood, not getting the answers he demanded aggravated him greatly..."

    —Brian Hicks, Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew (NY: Ballantine Books, 2004), 107

    I've known this word since childhood, and have never seen pernickety (that I can recall), so I thought I'd add this usage and see if we can get a good umbrage-fight started.

    September 18, 2009

  • "There was to be a little time of authentic beauty, however, before we ran full tilt upon the snobberies, the pernickities of the artist world upon that comic island, England." Frances Gregg, The Mystic Leeway.

    http://mysticleeway.blogspot.fr/

    July 13, 2013