pedantic
Americanadjective
-
ostentatious in one's learning.
-
overly concerned with minute details or formalisms, especially in teaching.
- Synonyms:
- doctrinaire, didactic
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of pedantic
Explanation
There's nothing wrong with focusing on the details, but someone who is pedantic makes a big display of knowing obscure facts and details. Pedantic means "like a pedant," someone who's too concerned with literal accuracy or formality. It's a negative term that implies someone is showing off book learning or trivia, especially in a tiresome way. You don't want to go antique-shopping with a pedantic friend, who will use the opportunity to bore you with his in-depth knowledge of 18th-century porcelain kitty-litter boxes.
Vocabulary lists containing pedantic
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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The SAT: Words to Capture Tone, List 7
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
His book, learned without being pedantic, reminds us how insistently earlier generations returned to the Revolution as a living argument—something to be invoked, revised and, at times, fought over.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 22, 2026
“One can read entire histories of American car culture and find no mention of Japanese or Asian American involvement,” Wang writes — but that’s about as pedantic as “Cruising J-Town” gets.
From Los Angeles Times • Nov. 30, 2025
It might sound pedantic to split hairs about the conspiracy theories that drive extremists like Mohn to do despicable things.
From Slate • Feb. 12, 2024
After a slightly pedantic exchange about wording, she conceded this meant she had deleted them.
From BBC • Jan. 31, 2024
Almost all his summer had been spent collecting pedantic data for his thesis, and now he was in a mood to think about important facts.
From "Double Helix" by James D. Watson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
