Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun One who is strict and precise in adherence to established rules, forms, or standards, especially with regard to religious observance or moral behavior.
- noun A Puritan.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Precise; punctiliously or ostentatiously observant of rules or doctrines.
- Characteristic of precisians; puritanical.
- noun One who adheres punctiliously to certain rules or observances; especially, one who is precise in matters of religion: often used depreciatingly with reference to the English Puritans of the seventeenth century.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun obsolete One who limits, or restrains.
- noun An overprecise person; one rigidly or ceremoniously exact in the observance of rules; a formalist; -- formerly applied to the English Puritans.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A religious
purist ; aPuritan . - noun Someone who strictly observes the rules; a
pedant orstickler .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Scrivener and "precisian" as his father was, he was a skilled musician, and the boy inherited his father's skill on lute and organ.
History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) Puritan England, 1603-1660 John Richard Green 1860
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"precisian" zealots held, by the governor-general's permission and under his protection, a synod at Dort, June, 1586, and endeavoured to organise the Reformed Church in accordance with their strict principles of exclusiveness.
History of Holland George Edmundson 1889
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It will be hours of argument with that rule-bound precisian Androctus, hours of searching for precedent in the Solamnic Measure of Knighthood.
Virginity Sydney Kilgore 2010
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Nobody is more free from the ostentatious correctness of the literary precisian, and nobody preserves so much purity and so much dignity of language with so little formality of demeanor.
Voltaire 2007
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But since that, Tony married a pure precisian, and is as good
Kenilworth 2004
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“How!” said Tressilian, who now for the first time interfered in their conversation; “did ye not say this Foster was married, and to a precisian?”
Kenilworth 2004
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“Why, you are not turned precisian or puritan, fool?” said
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I am, it may be, a little of a precisian, and I wish to
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But here is what neither Papist nor Puritan, latitudinarian nor precisian, ever boggles or makes mouths at.
Kenilworth 2004
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But do not be too much of a precisian, or "you will unnerve me of my strength."
The CRATYLUS Plato 1975
hernesheir commented on the word precisian
This day one plays a monarch, the next a private person; here one acts a tyrant, on the morrow an exile; a parasite this man to-night, to-morrow a precisian; and so of divers others. --An Excellent Actor, from Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century, 1891, p. 87.
January 5, 2012