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painstaking

[peynz-tey-king, peyn-stey-]

adjective

taking or characterized by taking pains or trouble; expending or showing diligent care and effort; careful: a painstaking craftsman; painstaking research.

noun

careful and diligent effort.

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Painstaking is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal.

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

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Origin:
1550–60; pain + -s³ + taking

Related forms

pains·tak·ing·ly, adverb

pains·tak·ing·ness, noun

Synonyms
1. thorough, scrupulous. Painstaking, careful, meticulous, conscientious all describe persons or behavior demonstrating attention to detail and effective task performance. painstaking stresses diligent and assiduous attention to detail in achieving a desired objective: a painstaking technician; the painstaking editing of a manuscript. Careful, the most general in sense of these words, implies serious intent to perform well and accurately whatever task one has in hand: a careful housepainter; a careful study of the social structure of gangs. Meticulous suggests extreme attention to details, especially the most minute, coupled with an almost obsessive desire to avoid error: a meticulous silversmith, every detail finished to perfection; fussily meticulous about matching shoes and clothing. Conscientious stresses scrupulous effort to obey one's sense of moral obligation to perform tasks well: a conscientious public defender; a conscientious description of the robbery.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To painstaking

Example Sentences

The large color photographs give no hint of their painstaking genesis.

We debate and negotiate the final language with painstaking care, especially the list of desired qualities and experience.

These things take years of painstaking work for dialectologists.

EXPAND

The large color photographs give no hint of their painstaking genesis.

We debate and negotiate the final language with painstaking care, especially the list of desired qualities and experience.

These things take years of painstaking work for dialectologists.

After two decades of painstaking effort, now he'd be scooped.

Painstaking research-especially of plant remains found with the body-contradicts many of the initial speculations.

Some photographs are happy accidents, others the painstaking result of careful planning and even years of practice.

The antibiotics had already killed the bacteria, and several painstaking tests were needed to prove it had ever been there.

Keeping a scale in balance can be a painstaking and never-ending task.

Global trade negotiations have always been long, painstaking affairs.

The painstaking process enabled the team to separate the human remains and compile an inventory of them.

But even after years of practice and experimentation, her workflow remains breathtakingly painstaking.

Charting the world's superlatives is painstaking work.

After all the sniffing and painstaking measurement, the study seems to state the obvious: keep your coffee cool and dry.

Emphasizing writing as a painstaking process that involves revision and re-evaluation in conversation with other people.

These painstaking efforts have helped the re-examination of some long-standing controversies.

The researchers' painstaking work has helped alert the world to the species's dramatic decline.

Juvenile members of any species with a high degree of parental care are quite unaware of the painstaking efforts of their parents.

It is amazing to learn the painstaking techniques of the archeologist while at a dig.

My bullet points don't come close to conveying the painstaking reasoning he lays out to back each of his conclusions.

It is an unusually painstaking effort to uncover apparent scholarly wrongdoing.

The past decade of painstaking negotiation had supposedly borne fruit in some degree of mutual trust between the two sides.

Artistic cartography and painstaking detail make this a map for any collector.

Once the painstaking circuitry was done, the whole thing went in for a re-spray.

It has taken decades of painstaking diplomatic work to arrive at this level of international openness.

What they were able to determine, after several years of painstaking research, was a unique genetic fingerprint for each shark.

When they finished the painstaking artistic process, they destroyed it.

The process of linguistic fieldwork is a painstaking one, fraught with pitfalls.

The painstaking movements that unfold so slowly in the weightlessness of space sap the tension from these events.

He's always had a thing for exhibiting velocity and action by jumping between painstaking slow-motion and abrupt fast-forward.

On the other hand, the painstaking reporting came at a price.

Making a film no longer required film or the painstaking process of editing reel or tape together.

Producing these combinations is a painstaking process.

It is simple, incremental and requires painstaking attention to what the customers want.

Mardikian will devote the next eight years or so to overseeing the painstaking conservation of the submarine.

The results of this painstaking process are working drawings that spec out every last fixture.

Designing and putting that jigsaw puzzle together has been painstaking.

Charatan is painstaking about her appearance and her social demeanor.

Carbon nanotubes would make ideal connecting wires in advanced circuits if not for the painstaking effort required.

Raising them is a painstaking process, since the orchids are hand.

Hours or days are spent lining up the little plastic bricks, painstaking work which is.

They list, in painstaking detail, hundreds of renovations undergone by village houses in the last.

With wrenching anger and painstaking care, his book describes how graft has infected the new establishment.

Instead progress is generally made by a painstaking piecing together of evidence.

Restoring the original circuitry can be painstaking and still.

She obviously understands all the roles she dances and makes painstaking attempts to convey their stylistic nuances.

Given these high stakes, it is no surprise that selecting the dozen jurors was a painstaking process.

It's still a remarkably impressive achievement when you consider the painstaking care that such a meticulous feat requires.

What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence.

Actually confirming a planetary cause of that dimming takes painstaking follow-up work at telescopes on the ground.

He was painstaking in shaping a program that showed the guests to best advantage while maintaining a balance.

Months of painstaking craft and hundreds of thousands of dollars went into their creation.

In this latest report the authors subject such controversies to painstaking cross-country forensics.

The expedition required painstaking logistics and almost superhuman stamina.

For in his latest screen drama the painstaking scenarist-director has.

And once that's done, years of painstaking research remain before synthetic biology is actually useful.

In much of this, of course, the film has some painstaking investigations and two jury verdicts on its side.

But a painstaking check of the people who obtained permits determined that all had been accounted for.

Mitford's forté was reporting, not painstaking prosody.

It is the kind of crime that investigators expect to be able to solve only after weeks of painstaking effort, if at all.

But no matter how painstaking the reporting, it has been produced to serve a particular agenda.

COLLAPSE

Collins

World English Dictionary

painstaking (ˈpeɪnzˌteɪkɪŋ)

—*adj*
	extremely careful, esp as to fine detail: painstaking research

'painstakingly

—*adv*

'painstakingness

—n

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

painstaking

1550s, paynes taking; see pain (n.) + take (v.). Related: Painstakingly.

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Related Words

careful curious dredge fastidious

fastidious hazard methodical

Matching Quote

"As for work, without it, without painstaking work, any writer or artist definitely remains a dilettante; there's no point in waiting for so-called blissful moments, for inspiration; if it comes, so much the better—but you keep working anyway."

-Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

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