One Step Now Education

February 28, 2025

meticulous

If you'll indulge me again with a sentence from Fuschia Dunlop's history of Chinese food, "Invitation to a Banquet."

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"When Chinese specialists do roast meats, their methods tend to be meticulous and sophisticated."

Meaning

What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?

The word meticulous is a familiar one to me. Some might say it is the opposite of disarray which we looked at previously. The Collins dictionary defines meticulous as "very carefully and in great detail."

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Many of my lessons with students are done in the context of actual reading or writing. We will read a chapter, article, passage, paragraph, or even just a sentence containing a word under study. Sometimes I select the word; sometimes they do. When we understand a word and its orthography, we then plug it back into the context of what we were reading to see if it makes sense. This is what we are hoping they do independently, eh?

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When I place this back into context of Dunlop's sentence, I know she is communicating to me that the chefs are highly specific and detailed. Coupled with the word sophisticated, I could also have used that context clue to help me determine the meaning of the word.

Structure

What are the elements that make up this word's structure?

After we study the inflectional suffixes, one of the first suffixes I usually teach students is

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meticul + ous

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I'm guessing that first piece can be analyzed into further elements. It might be <-ule>, which has several functions when found as a suffix. It could also be molecule.

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However, although our intuition gets better and better the more we practice scientific word study, we still must use evidence. For this, I often turn to the Online Etymological Dictionary. The entry for meticulous states that this word came to us in the 1500s and initially meant "timid." This sense has become obsolete.

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The entry goes on to show us the word originally is from Latin metus, "fear; dread." Words take strange journeys from an orthographic denotation of "fear; dread" to "carefully and in great detail."

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mete/ + icule/ + ous

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The slash marks indicate

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I'm going with the latter. The entry in wiktionary suggested an analogous relationship with periculosus, which they analyze further to culosus.

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mete/ + i + cule/ + ous

Relatives

What are the word's relatives and history?

In the Etymonline entry for meticulous, Douglas Harper, the sole author of Etymonline (go support!), says that metus has gone archaic after the 1700s. Therefore, I was unable to find any direct relatives for this word.

Graphemes

What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?

Stress can play a major role in why students misspell words. Since some vowels in unstressed syllables are reduced, often to schwa, and occasionally to zero, they can be spelled with almost any vowel or vowel digraph.

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The stress pattern in meticulous is

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USUU

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The

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If students know that adjectives ending with /əs/ is often spelled ridiculous and the aforementioned molecule.

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Students may insert a

Next Steps

What can we learn next about the English orthographic system?

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Stay curious,

Brad

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P.S. Did you notice the [j] in square brackets instead of slash brackets in the Graphemes section? Square brackets indicate a phone; slash brackets indicate a phoneme. A phone is the "physical realization of a phoneme" according to the Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics. A phoneme is a "minimal unit" in the sound system of a language. Phones are not language-specific. Students who spell by sound only may make errors by writing down phones like a [w] in going.