A person might think that whatever underlay the words trivia and trivial couldn't have been too important. (来源：http://www.EnglishCN.com)

Such a person might want to think again. Trivia and trivial have ancestors in common with the trivium taught in medieval universities. The Medieval Latin trivium—which developed from Classical Latin trivium, meaning "meeting of three ways; crossroads"—referred (in an academic context) to grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the three-subject lower division of the seven liberal arts then taught in universities. This trivium was hardly considered unimportant; students needed to master those three fields before moving up and on to the quadrivium: arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.

While the Medieval Latin trivium laid the groundwork for higher-end learning, its Classical Latin antecedent trivium branched out into trivia, meaning "unimportant matters, trivial facts or details."

Are we trying to say all roads lead to trivia? Perhaps. Remember the Classical Latin trivium meant "three roads meeting; crossroads." That sense developed into the Latin adjective trivialis, meaning "common, ordinary, trivial, that may be found everywhere." By the late 16th century, some half a century before the Medieval Latin trivium was borrowed into English, Anglophones were using trivial to describe something "of little worth or importance." However, as trivia buffs may already know, it wasn't until the early 1900s that trivia itself was formed in English from trivial.