"pettifoggery" meaning in All languages combined

See pettifoggery on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

IPA: /ˈpɛti.fɒɡ.ə.ɹi/ [UK] Forms: pettifoggeries [plural]
Etymology: From pettifogger + -ery. Etymology templates: {{suffix|en|pettifogger|ery}} pettifogger + -ery Head templates: {{en-noun}} pettifoggery (plural pettifoggeries)
  1. The actions of a pettifogger; a trivial quarrel. Synonyms: fuss, quibble, spat, squabble, tiff

Inflected forms

{
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "pettifogger",
        "3": "ery"
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      "expansion": "pettifogger + -ery",
      "name": "suffix"
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  ],
  "etymology_text": "From pettifogger + -ery.",
  "forms": [
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      "form": "pettifoggeries",
      "tags": [
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  "head_templates": [
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  "lang_code": "en",
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  "senses": [
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      "categories": [
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          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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          "text": "He was capable of using lawyerly rhetoric, at times, to the brink of pettifoggery.",
          "type": "example"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2011, Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, Knopf Doubleday (2011), p. 82",
          "text": "Yet even Harlan was to prove capable of grievous pettifoggery on the racial issue."
        },
        {
          "ref": "2011, Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, Knopf Doubleday (2011), p. 601",
          "text": "[Frankfurter's reasoning in Beauharnais v. Illinois] struck Black and the other three Roosevelt appointees who joined his dissent as noxious pettifoggery[.]"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2020 June 23, John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 317:",
          "text": "The idea that a minor bureaucratic restructuring could have made any difference in the time of Trump reflected how immune bureaucratic pettifoggery is to reality.",
          "type": "quote"
        }
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        "The actions of a pettifogger; a trivial quarrel."
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        {
          "word": "fuss"
        },
        {
          "word": "quibble"
        },
        {
          "word": "spat"
        },
        {
          "word": "squabble"
        },
        {
          "word": "tiff"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "ipa": "/ˈpɛti.fɒɡ.ə.ɹi/",
      "tags": [
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  "word": "pettifoggery"
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  ],
  "etymology_text": "From pettifogger + -ery.",
  "forms": [
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        },
        {
          "ref": "2011, Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, Knopf Doubleday (2011), p. 82",
          "text": "Yet even Harlan was to prove capable of grievous pettifoggery on the racial issue."
        },
        {
          "ref": "2011, Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, Knopf Doubleday (2011), p. 601",
          "text": "[Frankfurter's reasoning in Beauharnais v. Illinois] struck Black and the other three Roosevelt appointees who joined his dissent as noxious pettifoggery[.]"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2020 June 23, John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 317:",
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      ],
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      ],
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          "quarrel",
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    {
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      "tags": [
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  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "fuss"
    },
    {
      "word": "quibble"
    },
    {
      "word": "spat"
    },
    {
      "word": "squabble"
    },
    {
      "word": "tiff"
    }
  ],
  "word": "pettifoggery"
}

Download raw JSONL data for pettifoggery meaning in All languages combined (2.0kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-02-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-20 using wiktextract (05fdf6b and 9dbd323). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.