(trĭvˈē-əl)
adjective- Of little significance or value.
- Ordinary; commonplace.
- Concerned with or involving trivia.
- Biology Relating to or designating a species; specific.
- Mathematics
a. Of, relating to, or being the solution of an equation in which every variable is equal to zero.
b. Of, relating to, or being the simplest possible case; self-evident.
Related Forms:
Word History: The word
trivial entered Middle English with senses quite different from its most common contemporary ones. We find in a work from 1432-50 mention of the “arte trivialle,” an allusion to the three liberal arts that made up the trivium, the lower division of the seven liberal arts taught in medieval universities—grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The history of
trivial goes back to the Latin word
trivium, formed from the prefix
tri-, “three,” and
via, “road.”
Trivium thus meant “the meeting place of three roads, especially as a place of public resort.” The publicness of such a place also gave the word a pejorative sense that we express in the phrase
the gutter, as in “His manners were formed in the gutter.” The Latin adjective
triviālis, derived from
trivium, thus meant “appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar.”
Trivial is first recorded in English with a sense identical to that of
triviālis in 1589. Shortly after that
trivial is recorded in the sense most familiar to us, “of little importance or significance,” making it a word now used of things less weighty than grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
