• pedantic (adj.): marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects. ~ (Princeton’s WordNet 3.0).

• pedantic (adj.): characterised by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for academic knowledge and formal rules; [e.g.]: “a pedantic attention to details”; (adv.): pedantically. ~ (American Heritage Dictionary).

• pedantic (adj.): characterised by a narrow concern for book learning and formal rules, without knowledge or experience of practical matters; (synonyms): academic, bookish, donnish, formalistic, inkhorn, literary, pedantical, scholastic. ~ (American Heritage Roget’s Thesaurus).

• pedantic (adj.): 1. of, relating to, or characterised by the display of useless knowledge or minute observance of petty rules or details; (synonyms): hair-splitting, particular, formal, precise, fussy, punctilious, priggish, pedagogic, anal retentive, overnice; (informal): picky, nit-picking; [e.g.]: “All his pedantic quibbles were about grammar”; 2. of, relating to, or characterised by relying too much on academic learning or being concerned chiefly with insignificant detail; (synonyms): academic, pompous, schoolmasterly, stilted, erudite, scholastic, didactic, bookish, abstruse, donnish, sententious; [e.g.]: “His lecture was pedantic and uninteresting”. ~ (Collins English Thesaurus).

• a pedant is a person who is excessively concerned with formalism, accuracy, and precision, or one who makes an ostentatious and arrogant show of learning; etymology: the word pedant comes from the French pédant (used in 1566 in Darme & Hatzfeldster’s “General Dictionary of the French Language”) or its older mid-fifteenth century Italian source pedante, ‘teacher’, ‘schoolmaster’ (cf. the Spanish pedante). The origin of the Italian pedante is uncertain, but several dictionaries suggest it was contracted from the medieval Latin pædagogans, present participle of pædagogare, ‘to act as pedagogue’, ‘to teach’. The Latin word is derived from Greek παιδαγωγός, paidagōgós; from παιδ-, ‘'child’ + ἀγειν, ‘to lead’, which originally referred to a slave who escorted children to and from school but later meant ‘a source of instruction or guidance’. Medical Conditions: obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is in part characterised by a form of pedantry which is excessively concerned with the correct following of rules, procedures, and practices. Sometimes the rules which ᴏᴄᴘᴅ sufferers obsessively follow are of their own devising, or are corruptions or reinterpretations of the letter of actual rules. Pedantry can also be an indication of specific developmental disorders. In particular, people with Asperger’s Syndrome often have behaviour characterised by pedantic speech; see also: perfectionism. ~ (2023 Wikipedia Encyclopaedia). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedant].