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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 taedēre, 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.”
Synonyms
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.
Sara Merican, Deadline, 8 Feb. 2025
But even after that planeload arrived at El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, the Colombian capital, on Tuesday, passengers were caught up in long and tedious inspections at airports in Florida.
—Simón Posada, New York Times, 30 Jan. 2025
And specifically regarding those tedious to-do lists, OpenAI has introduced Tasks, a new beta agentic AI feature in ChatGPT that lets users set reminders and automate repetitive tasks.
—Amanda Kavanagh | This Column Was Created By Jobbio, The Hill, 17 Jan. 2025
Health systems in the U.S. are struggling to contend with burnout, staffing shortages and razor thin margins, so companies are racing to develop AI tools that can streamline some of the industry’s more tedious administrative tasks.
—Ashley Capoot, CNBC, 18 Jan. 2025
See all Example Sentences for tedious 
Dictionary Entries Near tedious
Cite this Entry
“Tedious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tedious. Accessed 16 Feb. 2025.
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