Meticulous means attending to every small detail, and getting all of them right. Meticulous notes, meticulous planning, a meticulous researcher who checks everything twice.
It is a compliment, and a strong one — stronger than careful and warmer than pedantic. Where careful says no mistakes were made, meticulous says an unusual amount of attention went in. The register is written and formal, and the usual pattern is meticulous about or meticulous in: meticulous about her records, meticulous in his preparation. The adverb meticulously is even commoner than the adjective, especially in the phrases meticulously researched and meticulously restored.
1adjectivemeticulousGiving very careful attention to every detail.
“Her notes were meticulous and ran to four notebooks.”
synonyms: thorough, painstaking, scrupulous
2adjectivedoneDone with that kind of attention.
“The restoration was meticulous, down to the hinges.”
meticulous is a quality of carefulness.
meTICulous → a TICK against every line
He goes down the list and puts a tick against every single line, and then goes down the whole list again to be sure.
hooks ontotick
Latin meticulosus meant fearful — from metus, dread. The English word has travelled a long way from that, but the connection is not silly: somebody who checks everything three times is, in a small way, afraid of getting it wrong.
Latin
meticulōsus — full of fear, timid, fearful, terrible, frightful
English, today
meticulous
Built from
Latin meticulōsus (“full of fear, timid, fearful, terrible, frightful”), from metus (“fear”) and -culōsus, extracted from perīculōsus (“perilous”). Sense of “characterized by very precise, conscientious attention to details” is a méticuleux.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA