Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun One who ostentatiously exhibits academic knowledge or who pays undue attention to minor details or formal rules.
- noun Obsolete A schoolmaster.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A schoolmaster; a teacher; a pedagogue.
- noun A person who overrates erudition, or lays an undue stress on exact knowledge of detail or of trifles, as compared with larger matters or with general principles; also, one who makes an undue or inappropriate display of learning.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun obsolete A schoolmaster; a pedagogue.
- noun One who puts on an air of learning; one who makes a vain display of learning; a pretender to superior knowledge.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun obsolete A
teacher orschoolmaster . - noun A person who is overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning.
- noun A person who emphasizes his/her knowledge through the use of vocabulary.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a person who pays more attention to formal rules and book learning than they merit
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like “fulgent” and “supercilious.”
Archive 2008-11-01 WENDEE HOLTCAMP 2008
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In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like “fulgent” and “supercilious.”
Amen to intellectualism! WENDEE HOLTCAMP 2008
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But any woman who could use that word pedant, I reasoned, call her ex-husband “duplicitous” and a “narcissist,” and describe an assistant manager we both worked for as a “troglodyte” was a woman I felt I could spend time talking to and perhaps even want to live with, despite the three kids, a first husband, and her extra year in age.
Closing Time Joseph Heller 1994
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A prig or a pedant was his favourite butt, and the performance was rendered all the more effective by his elaborate assumption of the _grand seigneur's_ manner.
Collections and Recollections George William Erskine Russell 1886
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I might likewise mention the law pedant, that is perpetually putting eases, repeating the transactions of Westminster
The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I Various 1885
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He did not like a mere smattering of literary chatter; he did not like to be called a pedant; but he knew, if any man did, what literature was and what was knowledge.
Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine Edward Augustus Freeman 1857
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In Shakespeare's day, a pedant was a male schoolteacher.
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'pedant' -- very frequently a 'pedant,' and now, it seems I am an
The Broad Highway Jeffery Farnol 1915
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Athaeneus, to philosophers and travellers, an opiniative ass, a caviller, a kind of pedant; for his manners, as Theod.
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He appeared to them to be a queer kind of pedant; they did not care for him, and made no overtures to him, and he avoided them.
frindley commented on the word pedant
See also pedants corner.
March 30, 2008