A pedant is a person who is excessively concerned with formalism, accuracy, and precision, or one who makes an ostentatious and arrogant show of learning.
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Etymology
The English language word "pedant" comes from the French pédant (used in 1566 in Darme & Hatzfeldster's Dictionnaire général de la langue française) or its older mid-15th century Italian source pedante, "teacher, schoolmaster". (Compare the Spanish pedante.) The origin of the Italian pedante is uncertain, but several dictionaries suggest that it was contracted from the medieval Latin pædagogans, present participle of pædagogare, "to act as pedagogue, to teach" (Du Cange). The Latin word is derived from Greek παιδαγωγός, paidagōgós, παιδ- "child" + ἀγειν "to lead", which originally referred to a slave who escorted children to and from school but later meant "a source of instruction or guidance".
Connotation
The term in English is typically used with a negative connotation to refer to someone who is over-concerned with minutiae and whose tone is condescending. Thomas Nashe wrote in Have with you to Saffron-walden (1596), page 43: "O, tis a precious apothegmaticall [terse] Pedant, who will finde matter inough to dilate a whole daye of the first inuention [invention] of Fy, fa, fum". However, when the word was first used by Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost (1598), it simply meant "teacher".
Medical conditions
Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder is in part characterized by a form of pedantry that is excessively concerned with the correct following of rules, procedures, and practices. Sometimes the rules that OCPD sufferers obsessively follow are of their own devising, or are corruptions or reinterpretations of the letter of actual rules.
Pedantry can also be an indication of specific developmental disorders. In particular, people with Asperger syndrome often have behaviour characterized by pedantic speech.