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tedious

UK/ˈtiː.dɪəs/US/ˈti.di.əs/
adjectiveC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,067 of 15,258neutral

Tedious means so long and dull it wears your patience away. A tedious meeting, tedious work, tediously slow.

The length is essential — a boring moment is not tedious, and a tedious task is dull and keeps going. It is a complaint about the effect on you rather than about the thing. The Latin taedium means weariness.

Adam Jones Adam63, cropped/retouched by User:Dcoetzee · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of tedious

  1. 1adjectivetediousSo long and dull it wears your patience away.C1

    “The flight was delayed for hours, and the wait in the airport was tedious.”

tedious is a quality of dullness.

Also accepted in games: boring, monotonous

Where it comes from

Latin taediosus comes from taedium, weariness or disgust. Tedium is the same word.

  1. Latin

    taediōsus

  2. Old French

    tedieus

  3. English, today

    tedious

English tedi(um) + ous, from Old French tedieus, from Latin taediōsus, from Latin taedium (“weariness, tedium”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Sharper Adjectives

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tedious in the wild

  • No matter the process used for preservation there seems to be a long and tedious process involved in creating the keepsakes, leading to long waits for order fulfillment.

    Breast milk jewelry

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.