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meticulous

adjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United States//mɪˈtɪkjɪlɪs//
  • United States//mɪˈtɪkjuləs//

Characterized by very precise, conscientious attention to details.

adjective

  1. 1

    Characterized by very precise, conscientious attention to details.

    meticulous search

    meticulous investigation

    meticulous knowledge

    meticulous report

  2. 2

    archaicTimid, fearful, overly cautious.

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin meticulōsus (“full of fear, timid, fearful, terrible, frightful”), from metus (“fear”) and -culōsus, extracted from perīculōsus (“perilous”). Sense of “characterized by very precise, conscientious attention to details” is a semantic loan from French méticuleux.

Forms

comparative
more meticulous
superlative
most meticulous
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).