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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Trivial \Triv"i*al\, adjective [L. trivialis, properly, that is in, or belongs to, the crossroads or public streets; hence, that may be found everywhere, common, fr. trivium a place where three roads meet, a crossroad, the public street; tri- (see {Tri-}) + via a way: cf. F. trivial. See {Voyage}.]
1. Found anywhere; common. [Obs.]
2. Ordinary; commonplace; trifling; vulgar.
As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial, and incapable of labor. --De Quincey.
3. Of little worth or importance; inconsiderable; trifling; petty; paltry; as, a trivial subject or affair.
The trivial round, the common task. --Keble.
4. Of or pertaining to the trivium.
{Trivial name} (Nat. Hist.), the specific name.
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Trivial \Triv"i*al\, noun One of the three liberal arts forming the trivium. [Obs.] --Skelton. Wood.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
trivial
adjective
1: (informal terms) small and of little importance; "a fiddling sum of money"; "a footling gesture"; "our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war"; "a little (or small) matter"; "Mickey Mouse regulations"; "a dispute over niggling details"; "limited to petty enterprises"; "piffling efforts"; "giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction" [syn: {fiddling}, {footling}, {lilliputian}, {little}, {Mickey Mouse}, {niggling}, {piddling}, {piffling}, {petty}, {picayune}]
2: obvious and dull; "trivial conversation"; "commonplace prose" [syn: {banal}, {commonplace}]
3: of little substance or significance; "a few superficial editorial changes"; "only trivial objections" [syn: {superficial}]
4: concerned with trivialities; "a trivial young woman"; "a trivial mind"
5: not large enough to consider or notice [syn: {insignificant}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
111 Moby Thesaurus words for "trivial": Mickey, NG, airy, ankle-deep, asinine, base, bickering, captious, casual, catchpenny, caviling, cheap, choplogic, cursory, deficient, depthless, empty, epidermal, equivocatory, evasive, fatuous, few, flimsy, foolish, footling, fribble, fribbling, frivolous, frothy, futile, good-for-naught, good-for-nothing, hairsplitting, hedging, idle, imperfect, inadequate, inane, incompetent, inconsequential, inconsiderable, insignificant, insufficient, jejune, junk, junky, knee-deep, light, little, logic-chopping, low, maladroit, meager, mean, measly, mediocre, miniature, minor, negligible, nit-picking, no great shakes, no-account, no-good, not comparable, not deep, not in it, not worth having, not worth mentioning, not worthwhile, nugacious, nugatory, on the surface, otiose, out of it, paltering, petty, picayune, picayunish, pussyfooting, quibbling, shabby, shallow, shallow-rooted, shoal, shoddy, shoestring, short, shuffling, silly, skin-deep, slender, slight, small, small-beer, superficial, surface, thin, tiny, trashy, trichoschistic, trifling, trite, unimportant, unprofound, unskillful, vacuous, vain, valueless, vapid, windy, worthless
From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:
trivial adjective
1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speaker's time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly {cretinous} would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish 'trivial' usually evaluates to 'I've seen it before'). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See {nontrivial}, {uninteresting}.
The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay "Los Alamos From Below" in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"), defined 'trivial theorem' as "one that has already been proved".
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