characterized by extreme care and great effort; "conscientious application to the work at hand"; "painstaking research"; "scrupulous attention to details"
guided by or in accordance with conscience or sense of right and wrong; "a conscientious decision to speak out about injustice"
status established in order of importance or urgency; "...its precedence as the world's leading manufacturer of pharmaceuticals"; "national independence takes priority over class struggle"
the quality of excelling; possessing good qualities in high degree
an outstanding feature; something in which something or someone excels; "a center of manufacturing excellence"; "the use of herbs is one of the excellencies of French cuisine"
giving careful attention to detail; hard to please; excessively concerned with cleanliness; "a fastidious and incisive intellect"; "fastidious about personal cleanliness"
having complicated nutritional requirements; especially growing only in special artificial cultures; "fastidious microorganisms"; "certain highly specialized xerophytes are extremely exacting in their requirements"
difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge; "the professor's lectures were so abstruse that students tended to avoid them"; "a deep metaphysical theory"; "some recondite problem in historiography"