trivial

Etymology

PIE word *tréyes * From Latin triviālis (“appropriate to the street-corner, commonplace, vulgar”), from trivium (“place where three roads meet”). Compare trivium, trivia. * From the distinction between trivium (“the lower division of the liberal arts; grammar, logic and rhetoric”) and quadrivium (“the higher division of the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages, composed of geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music”).

adj

1. Ignorable; of little significance or value.
   In fact, the influence of signage in a certain area may exist anywhere on a continuum from profoundly effective to utterly trivial or completely insignificant, irrespective of the intent motivating the signs. 2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 11
2. Commonplace, ordinary.
   As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and incapable of labour. 1842, Thomas De Quincey, “Cicero”, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
3. Concerned with or involving trivia.
4. (taxonomy) Relating to or designating the name of a species; specific as opposed to generic.
5. (mathematics) Of, relating to, or being the simplest possible case.
6. (mathematics) Self-evident.
7. Pertaining to the trivium.
8. (philosophy) Indistinguishable in case of truth or falsity.

noun

1. (obsolete) Any of the three liberal arts forming the trivium.
   Tryuyals, & quatryuyals, ſo ſore now they appayre That Parrot the Popagay, hath pytye to beholde How the reſt of good lernyng, is roufled vp & trold c. 1521, John Skelton, Speke Parott