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The Long and Uneventful History of Tedious
Words frequently change their meanings, and some even will go from meaning one thing to meaning something almost opposite (such as nice, which in its earliest use meant "lewd, wanton, dissolute"). Tedious is not one of these words; its meanings may have shifted over the centuries, but they have always had something to do with irksome, boring, or overlong things. The word comes from the Latin taedēre, meaning “to disgust or weary.” Tedious has been in use since the 15th century and has been included in hundreds of dictionaries, although perhaps none have rendered so poetic and succinct a definition as Nathaniel Bailey’s entry in his 1756 New Universal Etymological English Dictionary: “Wearisome by continuance.”
Examples of tedious in a Sentence
Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, 16 June 1994
Another of their assignments was to slow-fly any plane that had a new engine to break it in; that meant flying the aircraft for a tedious hour-and-a-half as slowly as it would possibly go without falling out of the sky.
—Doris Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 1990
From there, it became clear that the deposition was going to be neither as undramatic nor as quotidian, and even tedious, as it at first appeared.
—Renata Adler, New Yorker, June 23, 1986
He made a tedious 45-minute speech.
The work is tedious, but it needs to get done.
Arricca Elin Sansone, Southern Living, 25 Feb. 2025
The big picture: Ad agencies can have a tedious and highly manual expense management process that's prone to human error.
—Lucinda Shen, Axios, 25 Feb. 2025
At the risk of sounding too preachy (or maybe tedious?
—James Parker, The Atlantic, 25 Feb. 2025
The result is both tedious and repellent, a shame given how much mindless fun Prime Target might otherwise have been.
—Graham Hillard, Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, 21 Feb. 2025
See All Example Sentences for tedious
Cite this Entry
“Tedious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tedious. Accessed 20 Mar. 2025.
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