How to Use pedant in a Sentence
pedant
noun-
My son, learn music but don’t be a pedant in it.
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Victor J. Blue,
Harpers Magazine,
23 Nov. 2025
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My son, learn music but don’t be a pedant in it.
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Victor J. Blue,
Harpers Magazine,
23 Nov. 2025
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As botanists and pedants will tell you, figs are technically a flower, not a fruit.
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Emily Saladino,
Bon Appetit Magazine,
20 Sep. 2025
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Rarely is there much conceptual overlap between the categories of pedant and genius.
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Clare Bucknell,
The New York Review of Books,
27 June 2026
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The profile of the pedant has changed surprisingly across time periods and cultures, but what’s constant is that nobody wants to be called one.
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The New York Review of Books,
25 Apr. 2026
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Avery, the heroine of Anika Jade Levy’s debut novel, Flat Earth (Catapult, $26), spends many turgid nights with a pedant.
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Dan Piepenbring,
Harpers Magazine,
23 Nov. 2025
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Medieval schoolmen worrying over Aristotle could be pedants; so could cultivated female salonnières in seventeenth-century Paris.
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Clare Bucknell,
The New York Review of Books,
25 Apr. 2026
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People have been called pedants since the early modern period—pedante is a fifteenth-century Italian coinage for a professional teacher of Latin literature and rhetoric—but have been acting pedantically for millennia.
—
Clare Bucknell,
The New York Review of Books,
25 Apr. 2026
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'pedant.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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