Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A lawyer whose practice involves petty matters or who lacks sound legal judgment or skills.
  • noun One who quibbles over trivia.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An inferior attorney or lawyer who is employed in small or mean business.
  • noun The rockling.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A lawyer who deals in petty cases; an attorney whose methods are mean and tricky; an inferior lawyer.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Someone who quibbles over trivia, and raises petty, annoying objections.
  • noun An unscrupulous or unethical lawyer, especially one of lesser skill.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a disputant who quibbles; someone who raises annoying petty objections
  • noun a person (especially a lawyer or politician) who uses unscrupulous or unethical methods

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Probably petty + obsolete fogger, pettifogger (probably akin to obsolete German Fugger, successful merchant, usurer, huckster, after the House of Fugger).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From petty + fogger.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word pettifogger.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • I'm quite disappointed that, after all these years, the quality of your fogging hasn't improved.

    November 21, 2009

  • Go fog yourself.

    November 21, 2009

  • A fellow I know is a blogger,

    An alt-right conspiracy flogger.

    No absence of facts

    Or motive distracts

    From work of a true pettifogger.

    October 12, 2017