meticulously
Americanadverb
Other Word Forms
Derived 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.
And his simple Quaker-like garb, which contrasts with Houdon’s use of classical references in other portraits, is rendered meticulously, down to the threads of the unused buttonholes.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 12, 2026
From the scaffolding, restorers have been meticulously filling in damaged portions of the frescoes and conservatively layering paint over bare sections with delicate brushes, their hands protected by gloves.
From Barron's • Jun. 12, 2026
I make a lot of phone calls for stories, and meticulously transcribing those interviews has been the bane of my existence since I was in high school.
From Slate • May 24, 2026
This isn't necessarily a story of a single all-conquering season, but rather the culmination of a meticulously plotted six-year project.
From BBC • May 19, 2026
The Cavendish understandably harbored a proprietary interest in the characteristics of the particle it had discovered, not to mention a native pride in its ability to extract precise measurements from its meticulously hand-built equipment.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
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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.