trivial [LME] Latin trivium meant ‘a place where three roads meet’, and it is from this that we get our word trivial. Medieval universities offered a basic introductory course involving the study of three subjects—grammar, rhetoric, and logic—known as the trivium. The earliest uses of trivial relate to this basic, low-level course, with the main modern meanings, ‘commonplace, ordinary’ and ‘unimportant, slight’, developing in the late 16th century, after the Renaissance had devalued medieval learning. The plural of Latin trivium has also entered English as trivia [E20th]. A crossroads, a place where not three but four roads meet, has a similar metaphorical relationship with *crucial, a word which means almost the exact opposite of trivial.