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 orfussy . - adjective
Obsessive about mundane details, demanding forprecision .
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
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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You are the first person to use the word persnickety that I have ever encountered – Way To GO! good word
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"To be polite, I'd call her persnickety," he told me.
NYT > Home Page By PAULA SPAN 2010
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"To be polite, I'd call her persnickety," he told me.
NYT > Home Page By PAULA SPAN 2010
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Sales are too complicated in Manhattan because there are many other factors involved in a sale, such as persnickety co-op boards or new development condos that prefer cash buyers at first.
Pauline Millard: Is a Warming Rental Market in Manhattan a Sign of a Better Economy? Pauline Millard 2011
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Sales are too complicated in Manhattan because there are many other factors involved in a sale, such as persnickety co-op boards or new development condos that prefer cash buyers at first.
Pauline Millard: Is a Warming Rental Market in Manhattan a Sign of a Better Economy? Pauline Millard 2011
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I offer some 'persnickety' counsel; Sarah, thou must discover olde America's Christian Talibanists in more than books.
Air America: "Sarah Vowell, 'social observer', not!" Michael Caddell 2009
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Ms. Jones says "persnickety" details in recipes, such as asking for a specific size onion, mandating "fussy" ways of cutting vegetables and listing expensive or hard-to-find ingredients, are frustrating home cooks.
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Voltaire's novel ends with our hero more or less happily settled down with his love interest, who becomes, unfortunately, kind of persnickety and not much to look at as the years go by, but a talented pastry chef nonetheless.
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Voltaire's novel ends with our hero more or less happily settled down with his love interest, who becomes, unfortunately, kind of persnickety and not much to look at as the years go by, but a talented pastry chef nonetheless.
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There are no words to describe the feeling of becoming a new father for the first time, so I will just use the word "persnickety".
unclebob Diary Entry unclebob 2000
oroboros commented on the word persnickety
See pernickety.
August 16, 2007
skipvia commented on the word persnickety
One of those non-onomatopoeias that sounds exactly like what it means.
October 14, 2007
lea commented on the word persnickety
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
chained_bear commented on the word persnickety
"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
odile.stuart commented on the word persnickety
"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