Definition of "veriest"

Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.

1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “The Albatross”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, page 264

If it had come to crawling before Mr Kurtz, he crawled as much as the veriest savage of them all.

1899 April, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number MII, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], part III (Conclusion), page 638, column 1

He wheeled away down the narrow sandy street like the veriest derelict.

1979, Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, Random House, page 81

One commentator observed that “to connect the dinosaurs, creatures of interest to but the veriest dullards, with a spectacular extraterrestrial event” seemed “like one of those plots a clever publisher might concoct to guarantee sales.”

2014, Elizabeth Kolbert, chapter 4, in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Henry Holt and Company