Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Indicating personality traits, such as extreme fastidiousness, stinginess, and obstinacy, supposed by psychoanalytic theory to originate during the anal stage in habits, attitudes, or values associated with infantile pleasure in retention of feces.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
Preoccupied with achievingorder andcontrol and withcollecting ,possessing , andretaining objects. - adjective by extension Overly
obsessive concerning smalldetails .
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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This, on the other hand, I read because I wanted to see how it came out, not because I spell anal-retentive with the hyphen in.
Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway truepenny 2009
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Figures for acceptable purses in the most high-profile events, worked out to the last pound in anal-retentive detail, are suddenly irrelevant.
Humiliating climbdown surely spells apocalypse for Horsemen's tariff 2011
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Everyone else looks at you and sees an obsessive-compulsive, anal-retentive insomniac with a pen fetish.
2010 April « 2010
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If my inbox shows more than 60 emails sitting there waiting to be answered or taken care of in some way, I get very anxious (yes, I'm a bit anal-retentive).
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The Turks and the British shared an anal-retentive streak in Empire management and the historical provenance is unanswerable.
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Everyone else looks at you and sees an obsessive-compulsive, anal-retentive insomniac with a pen fetish.
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If you've never spotted him hawking his wares on QVC, where he appears regularly, then perhaps you've seen him on "Flipping Out," Bravo's hit reality show starring Jeff Lewis, the infamously obsessive-compulsive and anal-retentive house-flipper and designer, who is renovating the Chaz Dean Studio.
Meredith Barnett: Meet the Man Behind Gwyneth's Lovely Locks Meredith Barnett 2011
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It's easy to maintain and good protection without being overly anal-retentive or time consuming.
Separate Data From Windows On A Standalone Partition | Lifehacker Australia 2009
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If you've never spotted him hawking his wares on QVC, where he appears regularly, then perhaps you've seen him on "Flipping Out," Bravo's hit reality show starring Jeff Lewis, the infamously obsessive-compulsive and anal-retentive house-flipper and designer, who is renovating the Chaz Dean Studio.
Meredith Barnett: Meet the Man Behind Gwyneth's Lovely Locks Meredith Barnett 2011
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The unlikely teamup of the anal-retentive geek and the hard-edged badass work well and the pacing is good for this rather short movie.
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