Word.ws English Dictionary

pædant

pædant is the obsolete spelling of pedant.

Meaning of pedant

Noun

pedant (plural pedants)

  1. A person who makes an excessive or tedious show of their knowledge, especially regarding rules of vocabulary and grammar.
  2. A person who is overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning.
  3. (archaic) A teacher or schoolmaster.
    • I have in my youth oftentimes beene vexed to see a Pedant [tr. pedante] brought in, in most of Italian comedies, for a vice or sport-maker, and the nicke-name of Magister to be of no better signification amongst us.1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 24, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book I, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC

See all 5 meanings of pedant

Forms of pædant

pluralpædants

Origin of pædant

From the association of Italian pedante with unrelated Italian pedagogo (Latin paedagōgus).

Questions about pædant

What is pædant the obsolete spelling of?
Pædant is the obsolete spelling of pedant.

Words near pædant in the dictionary

  1. pædagogical
  2. pædagogically
  3. pædagogs
  4. pædagogue
  5. pædagogues
  6. pædant
  7. pædantic
  8. pædantries
  9. pædantry
  10. pædants
  11. pæderast

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pædant (page history and authors); pedant (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “pædant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/p%C3%A6dant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.