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The Long and Uneventful History of Tedious
Words frequently change their meanings, and some even will go from meaning one thing to meaning something almost opposite (such as nice, which in its earliest use meant "lewd, wanton, dissolute"). Tedious is not one of these words; its meanings may have shifted over the centuries, but they have always had something to do with irksome, boring, or overlong things. The word comes from the Latin taedÄ“re, meaning “to disgust or weary.†Tedious has been in use since the 15th century and has been included in hundreds of dictionaries, although perhaps none have rendered so poetic and succinct a definition as Nathaniel Bailey’s entry in his 1756 New Universal Etymological English Dictionary: “Wearisome by continuance.â€
Examples of tedious in a Sentence
Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, 16 June 1994
Another of their assignments was to slow-fly any plane that had a new engine to break it in; that meant flying the aircraft for a tedious hour-and-a-half as slowly as it would possibly go without falling out of the sky.
—Doris Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 1990
From there, it became clear that the deposition was going to be neither as undramatic nor as quotidian, and even tedious, as it at first appeared.
—Renata Adler, New Yorker, June 23, 1986
He made a tedious 45-minute speech.
The work is tedious, but it needs to get done.
Roxana Hadadi, Vulture, 20 Mar. 2026
Perhaps its that in Korean, sun care is seen as an extension of skincare and a sensorial treat, not a tedious task.
—Deanna Pai, Vogue, 19 Mar. 2026
But a Reuters survey conducted last summer also found more than 70% of respondents believe AI is a force for good in the legal field that can drastically reduce the amount of human work hours put into tedious tasks, including reviewing lengthy documents.
—James Queally, Los Angeles Times, 18 Mar. 2026
The Academy Awards will never get past their inherent tedious contradictions.
—Monica Hesse, Washington Post, 16 Mar. 2026
See All Example Sentences for tedious
Cite this Entry
“Tedious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tedious. Accessed 27 Mar. 2026.
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tedious
adjective
