meticulous
- 01 C2 Proficiency
an old-fashioned way to describe someone who is very shy or afraid.
denoting a state of being timid, fearful, or overly cautious. This sense is no longer used in contemporary English.
Simple“In the old story, the meticulous mouse hid whenever he heard a noise.”
In context“The protagonist was described as a meticulous soul, shrinking from the slightest confrontation with his peers.”
Teacher's tipThis sense is archaic; modern speakers only use meticulous to mean 'careful with details'.
“The dark secret beneath a woman’s meticulous breakfast preparations is hinted at through imagery: a flower, “open like a yelling mouth”.”
“Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert said the siege was a “concerted and meticulous attempt at ethnic cleansing”, which left him disgusted and ashamed.”
Learned borrowing 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 semantic loan from French méticuleux.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.