quibble

he spent the entire evening quibbling about the historical inaccuracies in the television series on World War II
don't quibble over who gets to sit in front

Recent Examples of quibble from the Web

Kennedy, Justice Kennedy is also someone who has quibbled with whether Quill (ph) is still necessary.

— Fox News, "What are President Trump's next steps on North Korea?," 22 Apr. 2018
Make Dolores the uncompromising leader of the burgeoning robot uprising—with actual, permanent stakes for the park and its hosts and guests—and leave the quibbling to milquetoasts like Teddy.

— scott meslow, GQ, "What We Want From Westworld Season 2," 20 Apr. 2018
But when the duck (which was probably a goose decoy, but Windestål doesn't want to quibble on the finer details) opens its outh, fire comes out as its eyes light up in red.

— john wenz, Popular Mechanics, "This Is the Fire Breathing Duck Decoy You Didn't Know You Needed," 3 Feb. 2016
But lawmakers are still quibbling over a bevy of specific provisions that could be jammed into the $1.3 trillion spending bill.

— deirdre shesgreen, USA TODAY, "Republicans unveil $1.3 trillion spending bill for fiscal year 2018," 19 Mar. 2018
The conference may not have a viable national title contender in its ranks, but there’s no quibbling with its depth of quality.

— chris johnson, SI.com, "March Madness Day 1 Takeaways: Loyola-Chicago Provides a Spark; SEC Shines While Pac-12 Flops," 16 Mar. 2018
Mostly these characters talk over and around each other, quibbling over semantics instead of articulating ideas.

— alexis soloski, New York Times, "Review: In ‘Education,’ a Fictional Protest That Pales Next to Real Ones," 15 Mar. 2018
That may seem like quibbling, but the legal standard for obstruction of justice is difficult to meet, especially when a president's broad executive authorities are involved.

— aaron blake, Washington Post, "6 important questions Robert Mueller will want to ask President Trump," 25 Jan. 2018
But Lenovo has also made a number of small modifications beyond this, addressing perhaps my one quibble from last year's model, and more.

— peter bright, Ars Technica, "The best laptop of last year adds HDR, facial recognition, and 8th-gen processors," 9 Jan. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'quibble.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Did You Know?

Quibble can also be a noun meaning "an evasion of or shift from the point" or "a minor objection or criticism." Both forms of the word arrived in English in the mid-17th century. Presumably (though not certainly) quibble originated as a diminutive of a now obsolete word, quib, which also meant "quibble." In fact, although language experts may quibble over this, there is a possibility that quib can be traced back to the plural of the Latin word qui, meaning "who," which was often used in legal documents. If so, that makes quibble a very distant cousin of the English word who.