Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use trivial in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective, noun

Trivial means ignorable; of little significance or value. Example: “Substantive editing is never trivial, whereas some aspects of copyediting are trivial.”

Examples of trivial by meaning

adjectiveIgnorable; 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...

More sentences with trivial

  • Substantive editing is never trivial, whereas some aspects of copyediting are trivial.From the entry substantive
  • Right-minded people do not throw away their lives because trivial insults occur.From the entry right-minded
  • She is very whiny; she keeps complaining about trivial things.From the entry whiny
  • The meeting was distastefully crammed with trivial agenda items.From the entry distastefully
  • The trivial absolute value gives rise to the discrete metric.From the entry trivial absolute value
  • The man suffered from innumeracy stemming from a brain injury, and depended on his wife for all financial matters, no matter how trivial.From the entry innumeracy
  • Trivial names such as "worm", "shrimp", "fish", "toad", "cobra", "vulture", and "mahogany", though convenient and popular, do not refer to any systematically-defined biological groupings of organisms.From the entry trivial name
  • With white anglospherian immigrants (who are not trivial in number) there is scarcely any issue here.2006 October 22, Energoumenos, “Will Labour be the 'anti-immigrant' party at the next election?”, in uk.politics.misc (Usenet). From the entry Anglospherian
  • We mismeet in relatively superficial and trivial conditions as well as in crucial ones.2003, Dennis Sidney Ross, God in Our Relationships, page 73. From the entry mismeet
  • Disjecta membra scattered everywhere, unrecognisable, through my oeuvre: complex, trivial, true.1999, Areté, page 84. From the entry disjecta membra
  • While they acquiescently wait to write, they busy themselves with other, often trivial, activities.1997, Gary A. Olson, Todd W. Taylor, Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, page 218. From the entry passively
  • Why, we are driven to ask, is this trivial creature presented with such hypervivid literalness?1986, Karl Kroeber, British Romantic Art, University of California Press, →ISBN, page 37. From the entry hypervivid
  • As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim.1985, Margaret Atwood, “Jezebel’s”, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart, →ISBN, part 12, page 237. From the entry frill
  • This may be a big dip in her purse, but in this financial comparison it is trivial.1979, Brian Jackson, Sonia Jackson, Childminder: A Study in Action Research. From the entry stairgate
  • In distinguished despair he lighted a cheroot, and for Aaron Gadd that was no trivial gesture.1948, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 5, in The God-Seeker, New York: Popular Library, page 29. From the entry cheroot
  • That sounded a trivial message, but the man began to cry.1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html)…. From the entry chip
  • Runround is always the result of an injury which may be very trivial.1907, Carl Reissig, The Standard Family Physician. From the entry runround
  • She would have given him a dozen of the trivial things had he asked for them!1906, Flora Annie Steel, chapter XXVI, in A Sovereign Remedy, London: William Heinemann, →OCLC, page 318. From the entry wifelet
  • The Indians, making a hasty inference from a trivial phenomenon, arrived unawares at a probably correct conclusion.1900, Andrew Lang, chapter 1, in The Making of Religion. From the entry phenomenon
  • There’s always another nonfiction book around the corner, waiting to ambush us with facts both trivial and pivotal.2026 June 26, “The People Are Hungry for Learning”, in House Tour (Random House), archived from the original on 28 Aug 2026. From the entry knowledgemaxx
  • If the grading is trivial and the involutive structure is not considered, we obtain some well known results as corollaries..2016, Roozbeh Hazrat, Lia Vas, “K-theory Classification of Graded Ultramatricial Algebras with Involution”, in arXiv. From the entry ultramatricial
  • Michoacán Icepack! numberless kilos of righteous weed, name your figure, just for trivial information we already have anyway.2009, Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice, page 33. From the entry Panama Red
  • Except in a few trivial cases, it generally isn't possible to prove that a buffer overrun isn't exploitable.2002, David LeBlanc, Michael Howard, Writing Secure Code, Pearson Education, →ISBN, page 133. From the entry buffer overrun
  • Almost all line segments will be trivial accepts or trivial rejects, so the above covers the vast majority of cases.1996, Jim Blinn, Jim Blinn's Corner: A Trip Down the Graphics Pipeline, page 127. From the entry accept
  • The feuilleton, like the other serious, trivial, and merely curious stories on the newspaper page, served up an excess of details.1990, Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin: 1900, page 44. From the entry feuilleton
  • Often the misimpression a reporter gives is trivial.1988 March 11, Michael Miner, “Broder Against Broder/For the Editor Who Dares to Be Different”, in Chicago Reader. From the entry misimpression
  • They don't think they are being trivial–Foodies consider food to be an art, on a level with painting or drama.1984, Ann Barr, Paul Levy, The Official Foodie Handbook: Be Modern–Worship Food, London: Ebury Press, →ISBN, page 6. From the entry foodie
  • Besides, under such a system, we would once and for all abolish the trivial "Spring forward, fall back."1971 October 28, Craig Hosmer, “Fiddling around with ‘God’s Time’”, in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 92d Congress…. From the entry spring forward, fall back
  • To others the little adventure must seem trivial, but to myself it represented the climax of a chain of events.1916, Hugh Walpole, chapter 7, in The Dark Forest, section 1, page 205. From the entry chain of events
  • From model-theoretic point of view the category of representations is a multisorted structure which we prove to be superstable with pregeometry of trivial type.2016, Boris Zilber, Lubna Shaheen, “Model theory and geometry of representations of rings of integers”, in arXiv. From the entry multisorted
  • Alternately, the variation in motor neuron number may be trivial and have little functional impact, because crustacean muscles generally have sparse polyneuronal innervation.2015, Zen Faulkes, M Fabiana Kubke, “Motor neurons in the escape response circuit of white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus)”, in PeerJ…. From the entry polyneuronal
  • It isn't trivial to find a decision-theoretic foundation for game theory in which an agent's coplayers are a non-distinguished part of the agent's environment.2015, Benja Fallenstein, Jessica Taylor, Paul F. Christiano, “Reflective Oracles: A Foundation for Classical Game Theory”, in arXiv. From the entry coplayers
  • The new twist is introduced in the course of a short and seemingly trivial conversation between two slaves, Xanthias and one of Plouton’s servants.2013, Mark Griffith, “What Happens in Frogs? (The Plot)”, in Aristophanes’ Frogs (Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature), New York…. From the entry Plouton
  • This makes it trivial to templatize your application; changes to the new generic base form automatically cascade to the derived classes at the next build.2004, Chris Sells, Justin Gehtland, Windows Forms programming in Visual Basic.NET. From the entry templatize
  • Furthermore, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) recommended that chemists should stop using imprecise terms such as systematic and trivial.1997 Lynne Bowker, "You say "flatbed colour scanner", I say "colour flatbed scanner": A descriptive study of the influence of…. From the entry acribic
  • But now I feel as if my ears were as big as saucers when I overlisten the most trivial snatches of conversation."1960, David Taylor, Storm the Last Rampart, Philadelphia, P.A.; New York, N.Y.: J. B. Lippincott Company, page 149. From the entry overlisten
  • Only they are not so trivial if we consider the power of feeling evoked by Motion Pictures, and the number of movie-goers.1943, Michael Melucci, Political Cinematology: How Motion Pictures and Television Will Shape the Political Destiny of America (Tele-Screen…. From the entry trivium
  • Those who do not move in the inner circle of fashion have little notion how relatively trivial causes may occasionally achieve tremendous consequences.1926 January 5, “The Latest Month”, in The Devon and Exeter Gazette, volume CLIV, number 24,829, Exeter, Devon, page 8, column 2. From the entry Alexandrian limp
  • In comparison with his imperial power the influence and prerogatives of presidents, prime ministers, and kings of states, are limited and trivial.1920, Mathew Carey, World Call, Men and Millions Movement, page 26. From the entry supergod

Meaning of trivial

  1. adjective Ignorable; of little significance or value.
  2. adjective Commonplace, ordinary.
  3. adjective Easy; requiring little skill or effort.

Full definition of trivial

Questions about trivial in a sentence

How do you use trivial in a sentence?
Trivial is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “Substantive editing is never trivial, whereas some aspects of copyediting are trivial.”
What is a short sentence with trivial?
“Often the misimpression a reporter gives is trivial.”
What does trivial mean?
Trivial means ignorable; of little significance or value.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: trivial (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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