Fastidious means very hard to please about detail and cleanliness. Fastidious about his food, fastidiously neat, a fastidious editor.
It sits between careful and impossible, and whether it flatters depends entirely on the tone. In microbiology it has a precise sense: a fastidious organism is one that will only grow under exact conditions.
1adjectivefastidiousVery hard to please about detail and cleanliness.
“He is fastidious about his kitchen and wipes every surface twice.”
fastidious is a quality.
Latin fastidiosus comes from fastidium, loathing or disgust.
Latin
fastīdiōsus — passive: that feels disgust, disdainful, scornful, fastidious; active: that causes disgust, disgusting, loathsome
English, today
fastidious
Built from
Latin fastīdiōsus (“passive: that feels disgust, disdainful, scornful, fastidious; active: that causes disgust, disgusting, loathsome”), from fastīdium (“a loathing, aversion, disgust, niceness of taste, daintiness, etc.”), perhaps for fastutidium, from fastus (“disdain, haughtiness, arrogance, disgust”) + taedium (“disgust”). Cf. French fastidieux*.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA