Nitpicking

Nitpicking is a term, first attested in 1956, that describes the action of giving too much attention to unimportant detail.

[1][3] The terminology originates from the common act of manually removing nits (the eggs of lice, generally head lice) from another person's hair.

[4] As nitpicking inherently requires fastidious attention to detail, the term has become appropriated to describe the practice of meticulously searching for minor, even trivial errors in detail.

[5] Nitpicking has been used to describe dishonest insurers[6] and bullying employers, or even bullying family members.

This vocabulary-related article is a stub.