punctilious

From punctilio (“fine point in exactness of conduct”) + -ous.

• IPA^(key): /pʌŋkˈtɪli.əs/

  • Audio (Southern England):

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punctilious (comparative more punctilious, superlative most punctilious)

1. Strictly attentive to detail; meticulous or fastidious, particularly to codes or conventions.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:meticulous

   With a punctilious slap of the gloves, the duel was now inevitable.

   • 2001 May 12, Robert Potts, “The poet at play”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     He was punctilious. According to those who worked with him, even his paperwork was the best they'd seen.

2. Precise or scrupulous; finicky or nitpicky.

   Synonyms: finicky, nitpicky, precise; see also Thesaurus:meticulous

   • 2009, Ronnie Cann, Ruth Kempson, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Semantics: an introduction to meaning in language:

     Of course, humans do not treat time in such a punctilious fashion.

   • 2017, Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Pantheon Books, page 103:

     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.

• point
• punctuate
• punctual
• punctuality
• punctuation

• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “punctilious”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.