To quibble is to argue or complain about small, unimportant things. Quibble can also mean "to evade the point of an argument by making trivial or frivolous objections."

// Why are you quibbling over such a small amount of money?

// People ignored the main point of the speech and quibbled about its length.

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"In 'Louisa, Please Come Home,' one of Jackson's most deeply affecting stories, a girl on the cusp of womanhood runs away from home and disappears into a new life in a new city, where she finds a room in a boarding house and a job in a stationery store. Jackson's agent, who judged it 'a powerful and brilliant horror story,' quibbled with her decision to leave the character's motive unexplained, but it's clear that Louisa doesn't need a reason to run away. She wants simply to disappear …" — Ruth Franklin, introduction to The Lottery and Other Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson, 2025

There's not much to quibble about when it comes to the origins of the verb quibble: it followed the noun quibble, meaning "an evasion of or shift from the point" and "a minor objection or criticism," into the language in the mid-17th century. That word is likely a diminutive of a now-obsolete noun quib, also referring to an evasion of or shift from the point. Quib, in turn, likely comes from a form of Latin qui, meaning "who," that is also a distant relation of our word who.