painstaking
Americanadjective
noun
adjective
Synonym Usage
Painstaking, careful, meticulous, conscientious all describe persons or behavior demonstrating attention to detail and effective task performance. painstaking stresses diligent and assiduous attention to detail in achieving a desired objective: a painstaking technician; the painstaking editing of a manuscript. Careful , the most general in sense of these words, implies serious intent to perform well and accurately whatever task one has in hand: a careful housepainter; a careful study of the social structure of gangs. Meticulous suggests extreme attention to details, especially the most minute, coupled with an almost obsessive desire to avoid error: a meticulous silversmith, every detail finished to perfection; fussily meticulous about matching shoes and clothing. Conscientious stresses scrupulous effort to obey one's sense of moral obligation to perform tasks well: a conscientious public defender; a conscientious description of the robbery.
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of painstaking
Explanation
If you notice that painstaking is composed of pains and taking, you already have a pretty clear sense of what this adjective means: to be painstaking is to be so careful, so meticulous, so thorough, that it hurts. Painstaking is most commonly paired with detail — in fact, writers might like to avoid the phrase “painstaking detail” as clichéd. In contemporary usage, the agony implied by the word often seems to be shared by both the person who makes a painstaking effort and the person confronted with the fruits of that labor: “Gertrude’s ability to appear politely interested was tested as her dinner companion related his painstaking attempts to establish himself as the true heir to the British throne.”
Vocabulary lists containing painstaking
List 8
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Hatchet
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The Haunting of Hill House
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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.
Three weeks after the bombing, the Daily News reported that investigators “admit that thousands of hours of painstaking work have not put them on the track of anyone who could be called a likely suspect.”
From Slate ● Jul. 7, 2026
From a science standpoint, "the content of the documents is absolutely incredible", said Francois Kervyn, the museum geologist leading the project, describing decades of painstaking fieldwork carried out in largely unmapped regions.
From Barron's ● Jul. 3, 2026
Scroll through TikTok for long enough and you'll find short films about fictional relationships, with painstaking fan edits, imagined future storylines, AI-generated posters and millions of comments debating them as if they're real.
From BBC ● Jun. 17, 2026
This is, to put it plainly, the stuff of well-considered emotional rawness, painstaking portraiture of our collective pasts.
From Salon ● May 12, 2026
Time and again, she amazed him with a “shrewd ‘guess’” that was worth more than “a whole day’s painstaking labor.”
From "The Woman All Spies Fear" by Amy Butler Greenfield
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.
