Nitpicking is a term, first used in 1956, that describes the action of giving too much attention to unimportant detail. A person who nitpicks is termed as a nitpicker. The terminology originates from the common act of manually removing nits (the eggs of

lice Louse ( : lice) is the common name for any member of the clade Phthiraptera, which contains nearly 5,000 species of wingless parasitic insects. Phthiraptera has variously been recognized as an order, infraorder, or a parvorder, as a result o ...

, generally

head lice The head louse (''Pediculus humanus capitis'') is an obligate ectoparasite of humans. Head lice are wingless insects that spend their entire lives on the human scalp and feeding exclusively on human blood. Humans are the only known hosts of thi ...

) from another person's

hair Hair is a protein filament that grows from follicles found in the dermis. Hair is one of the defining characteristics of mammals. The human body, apart from areas of glabrous skin, is covered in follicles which produce thick terminal and f ...

. As nitpicking inherently requires fastidious attention to detail, the term has become appropriated to describe the practice of meticulously searching for minor, even trivial errors in detail. Nitpicking has been used to describe dishonest insurers and bullying employers, or even bullying family members.Management Bullies: The Effect on Employees
''Journal of Business Studies Quarterly''. 2013, Volume 4, Number 4.

References

Hygiene {{term-stub