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adjective

captious

tending to find fault or raise petty objections

In a sentence

Six example sentences with captious, each labelled with its topic.

  • The captious diner sent back the soup twice, once for temperature and once because the bowl was the wrong shade.

    Cooking

  • A captious judge marked down my landscape for a horizon two degrees off, ignoring the light I had waited hours for.

    Photography

  • Nothing shipped that quarter because a captious reviewer kept flagging font sizes in documents no customer would ever open.

    Business

  • A captious reviewer counted the commas in the first chapter and never mentioned what the novel was about.

    Literature

  • The captious examiner stopped the student twice over the angle of her elbow before she had played eight bars.

    Music

  • The seminar's most captious member objected to every definition on the grounds that one word in it was undefined.

    Philosophy

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Found in these word lists

Found in 3 published word listsRecognized

Each source is a published word list that contains captious. No exam board publishes an official GRE, GMAT or SAT list; GMAT words come from GRE lists and the Academic Word List.

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