Trivium

Quick meaning: Trivium is a noun meaning (education, historical) The lower division of the liberal arts in a medieval university; grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Meaning

(education, historical) The lower division of the liberal arts in a medieval university; grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

More Meanings

1. (zoology) The three anterior ambulacra of echinoderms, collectively.
2. (rare) Singular of trivia; anything of little importance.

Example Sentences

Surely some demon must possess the lad, / Who showed more wit than ever school-boy had, / And learned his Trivium thus without the rod; / But Alcuin said it was the grace of God.

Harcourt, Brace, and Co.: for an excerpt from Stuart Chase’s The Tyranny of Words; for E. M. Forster’s “My Wood,” in Abinger Harvest; and for a trivium from Logan Pearsall Smith’s All Trivia.

As to the nature of his studies, there can be no doubt that he [Dante] went through the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) of the then ordinary university course.

The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the freedmen’s sons by Atlanta University.

Word Forms

• triviums
• trivia

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include trivial, quadrivium, quadrivial, quadrium, tripus, triturium.

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