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Terse   /tərs/   Listen
adjective
Terse  adj.  (compar. terser; superl. tersest)  
1.
Appearing as if rubbed or wiped off; rubbed; smooth; polished. (Obs.) "Many stones,... although terse and smooth, have not this power attractive."
2.
Refined; accomplished; said of persons. (R. & Obs.) "Your polite and terse gallants."
3.
Elegantly concise; free of superfluous words; polished to smoothness; as, terse language; a terse style. "Terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence." "A poet, too, was there, whose verse Was tender, musical, and terse."
Synonyms: Neat; concise; compact. Terse, Concise. Terse was defined by Johnson "cleanly written", i. e., free from blemishes, neat or smooth. Its present sense is "free from excrescences," and hence, compact, with smoothness, grace, or elegance, as in the following lones of Whitehead: - ""In eight terse lines has Phaedrus told (So frugal were the bards of old) A tale of goats; and closed with grace, Plan, moral, all, in that short space."" It differs from concise in not implying, perhaps, quite as much condensation, but chiefly in the additional idea of "grace or elegance."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Terse" Quotes from Famous Books



... with approbation. 'Terse,' he reflected. 'Something to his advantage is not strictly true; but it's taking and original, and a man is not on oath in an advertisement. All that I require now is the ready cash for my own meals and for ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... there is an intimate relation between acromegaly and gigantism, but they go further and compare both to the growth of the body. They call attention to the striking resemblance to acromegaly of the disproportionate growth of the boy at adolescence, which corresponds so well to Marie's terse description of this disease: "The disease manifests itself by preference in the bones of the extremities and in the extremities of the bones," and conclude with this rather striking and aphoristic proposition: "Acromegaly is gigantism ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... desirable qualities in the use of English are the simple, plain, exact, lucid, concise, trenchant, vigorous, impressive, lively, figurative, polished, graceful, fluent, rhythmical, copious, elevated, flexible, smooth, dignified, terse, epigrammatic, felicitous, euphonious, elegant, and lofty. Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, verbose, redundant, inflated, prolix, ambiguous, feeble, monotonous, loose, slip-shod, dry, flowery, pedantic, pompous, rhetorical, grandiloquent, artificial, formal, ornate, halting, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser

... compiled under appropriate headings, alphabetically arranged, making the many stories easily available for the private reader and public teacher. Mr. Moody's idiom has been strictly preserved. He tells the story. "Gold" will be found scattered through the volume, which includes Mr. Moody's terse declarations of many precious and ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody

... have been summarily remedied, but he was also the Bounds of two other gentlemen in the neighborhood. From eight until eleven in the morning he was entirely Anthony's. He arrived with the mail and cooked breakfast. At nine-thirty he pulled the edge of Anthony's blanket and spoke a few terse words—Anthony never remembered clearly what they were and rather suspected they were deprecative; then he served breakfast on a card-table in the front room, made the bed and, after asking with some hostility if there was ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald


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