PITHY • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Pithy

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/pˈɪθi/ Listen

adjective

Pithy adj. (compar. pithier; superl. pithiest)

Consisting wholly, or in part, of pith; abounding in pith; as, a pithy stem; a pithy fruit.

Having nervous energy; forceful; cogent. "This pithy speech prevailed, and all agreed." "In all these Goodman Fact was very short, but pithy."

Pithy gall (Zool.), a large, rough, furrowed, oblong gall, formed on blackberry canes by a small gallfly (Diastrophus nebulosus).

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Etymology of 'Pithy'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Pithy" Quotes from Famous Books

... the banker merely bows and points to one. Lawyers, on the contrary, are expected to behave like any other gentlemen; so also physicians. The patient is directed in both cases to relate his grievances in short, pithy sentences; answer all questions clearly; apologise for taking up their time by asking them in turn—in consequence, he must say, of his own ignorance; and then finish by warmly thanking them for the attention they give to his affairs. ...

— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various

... Minister of Education of that period that the children attending the State schools should be instructed in the duties of citizenship, and that they should be taught something of the laws under which they lived, and I was commissioned to write a short and pithy statement of the case. It was to be simple enough for intelligent children in the fourth class; 11 or 12—it was to lead from the known to the unknown—it might include the elements of political economy and sociology—it might make use ...

— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... Baker, Jack Straw, Jack Trewman, Jack Carter, and probably of many more. Some of the choicest flowers of the publications charitably written and circulated by them gratis are upon record in Walsingham and Knyghton: and I am inclined to prefer the pithy and sententious brevity of these bulletins of ancient rebellion before the loose and confused prolixity of the modern advertisements of constitutional information. They contain more good morality and less bad ...

— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... bodies which acquire entirely new properties when raised beyond a certain degree of temperature. Indeed, we frequently meet touches of the conversational Johnson in his controversial writing. 'Taxation no Tyranny' is at moments almost as pithy as Swift, though the style is never so simple. The celebrated Letter to Chesterfield, and the letter in which he tells MacPherson that he will not be 'deterred from detecting what he thinks a cheat ...

— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... had a ready method of dealing with obnoxious authors, as poor Peter Wentworth discovered, who wrote A Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for establishing her Successor to the Crown, and for his pains was committed to the Tower, where he pined and died. This work advocated the claims of James VI. of Scotland, and was written ...

— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

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