fastidious
Adjective
- giving careful attention to detail; hard to please; excessively concerned with cleanliness
- "a fastidious and incisive intellect"
- "fastidious about personal cleanliness"
- having complicated nutritional requirements; especially growing only in special artificial cultures
- "fastidious microorganisms"
Adj
- Excessively particular, demanding, or fussy about details, especially about tidiness and cleanliness.
- Overly concerned about tidiness and cleanliness.
- Difficult to please; quick to find fault.
- Having precise requirements for nutrition and environment (chemical and physical); especially, being difficult to culture because of those requirements.
Examples
- fastidious organism
- fastidious species
Origin / Etymology
From Latin fastīdiōsus (“passive: that feels disgust, disdainful, scornful, fastidious; active: that causes disgust, disgusting, loathsome”), from fastīdium (“a loathing, aversion, disgust, niceness of taste, daintiness, etc.”), perhaps for *fastutidium, from fastus (“disdain, haughtiness, arrogance, disgust”) + taedium (“disgust”). Cf. French fastidieux.
Synonyms
exacting, anal-retentive, choosy, conscientious, dainty, fastidious, finical, finicking, finickity, finicky, finikin, fussy, hypercritical, lily-handed, meticulous, niggly, nit-picky, nitpickish, nitty, overcritical, overscrupulous, particular, pedantic, pernickety, persnickety, picky
Antonyms
unfastidious, careless, noncritical, nonfastidious, sloppy, unconscientious, uncritical, unfussy, unmeticulous
Scrabble Score: 14
fastidious: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordfastidious: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
fastidious: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary