Synonyms

meticulously

American

[muh-tik-yuh-luhs-lee] / məˈtɪk yə ləs li /

adverb

in a way that shows extreme care about minute details; in a precise and thorough way, sometimes to an excessive degree.

He'd had collections of various kinds as a kid, each of them meticulously sorted and, yes, even inventoried.

Other Word Forms

unmeticulously adverb

Etymology

Origin of meticulously

meticulous ( def. ) + -ly

Explanation

If you clean your house meticulously, you take plenty of time and scour every single nook and cranny, maybe even behind the oven and under the doormat. Meticulous means extremely careful and thorough, so if you do something meticulously, you are painstaking about doing it perfectly. Someone who would never leave her house with an un-ironed t-shirt or a thread hanging loose is someone who dresses meticulously. If your town historian documents every event, from births to remodeled living rooms, then she does her job meticulously, maybe a little too meticulously.

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Vocabulary lists containing meticulously

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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.

Some because they’re in the process of building their AI carefully and meticulously, but others because they don’t know what they’re doing with AI.

From MarketWatch • Apr. 10, 2026

Not all of it could be salvaged, so Knott’s meticulously re-created the look.

From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 17, 2026

Revealed in a shallow, veiled space, where light streams in gently at left, the figure’s soft handling is markedly different from the meticulously painted basket of fruit he offers to the viewer.

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 11, 2026

Over the past decade, researchers meticulously cleaned and assembled the delicate bones to prevent damage to the small and fragile skeleton.

From Science Daily • Mar. 10, 2026

The drafting table by the windows is all but hidden in the meticulously ordered chaos of papers and diagrams and blueprints.

From "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023