painstakingly

comparative more painstakingly · superlative most painstakingly

1. In a painstaking manner; very slowly and carefully.

   I wish he had had a dog, just so we could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among the family, in his careful business way.

   1909, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], “Is Shakespeare Dead?”, in What Is Man? And Other Essays, New York, N.Y.; London: Harper & Brothers, published May 1917, page 314

   2 more examples

   With the help of a friend from Zagreb, he found a map showing the locations of all the monuments and painstakingly sought them out, discovering while doing so that most of the thousands of Spomeniks had been deliberately destroyed.

   2013 June 18, Joshua Surtees, “Spomeniks: the second world war memorials that look like alien art”, in The Guardian, →ISSN, archived from the original on 03 Feb 2018

   Figuring out the combinatorial rules is painstakingly difficult work. […] Testing how the combinations go together requires access to a lot of language. If the language is only spoken—with no writing system (which is still the case for the majority of the world’s languages)—this is a difficult task.

   2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Introduction” (chapter 1), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 14