punctilious
adj/pʌŋkˈtɪli.əs/
Etymology From punctilio (“fine point in exactness of conduct”) + -ous.
1
Strictly attentive to detail; meticulous or fastidious, particularly to codes or conventions.
- With a punctilious slap of the gloves, the duel was now inevitable.
- He was punctilious. According to those who worked with him, even his paperwork was the best they'd seen.2001 May 12, Robert Potts, “The poet at play”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
2
Precise or scrupulous; finicky or nitpicky.
- Of course, humans do not treat time in such a punctilious fashion.2009, Ronnie Cann, Ruth Kempson, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Semantics: an introduction to meaning in language:
- Every editor at Merriam-Webster deals with the Black Books at many points during their tenure. The Black Books are the in-house set of rules for writing a dictionary (commonly called a style guide) as conceived and written in punctilious detail by the former editor in chief Philip Babcock Gove, for the creation of Webster’s Third.2017, Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Pantheon Books, page 103:
- Derived terms
- overpunctilious, punctiliously, punctiliousness, unpunctilious
- Related terms
- point, punctuate, punctual, punctuality, punctuation