meticulously
Americanadverb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of meticulously
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.
Vocabulary lists containing meticulously
The Giver
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Wonder
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Purple Hibiscus
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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.
The source music, meticulously researched by Hitchcock’s team, is equally memorable.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 4, 2026
“An authentic 1852 Italianate townhouse, meticulously restored into a passive-house sanctuary on one of the West Village’s most coveted blocks,” the latest listing states.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 1, 2026
We tend to assume the next clever kitchen system will come from a new cookbook, a viral freezer hack or somebody else’s meticulously labeled meal-prep containers.
From Salon ● Aug. 25, 2026
Once their spring blooms are complete, Aggrey meticulously collects the seed pods from the clarkias, gilias and phacelias, processes the seeds and packages them for gifting before the subsequent spring.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 3, 2026
Slowly, meticulously, he unwraps the coil, carries the entire looped mess downstairs, and calls Jutta inside to hold the pieces for him while he splices the breaks.
From "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr
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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.