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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



... short with terse candour. 'Yes,' she said, 'a false report is in circulation. I am not yet engaged to be married to any one, if that is ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... Tennessee, where the telegraph service at that time was under military law, although the operators received $125 a month. Here again Edison began to invent and improve on existing apparatus, with the result of having once more to "move on." The story may be told in his own terse language: "I was not the inventor of the auto repeater, but while in Memphis I worked on one. Learning that the chief operator, who was a protege of the superintendent, was trying in some way to put New York and New ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... 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, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser

... following the Red Cross ambulances. All the story of a day's warfare was written in the spectacle of that endless silent flow to the front: and we were to read it again, a few days later, in the terse announcement of "renewed activity" about Suippes, and of the bloody strip of ground gained between Perthes ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... him to read an auction bill?" Suddenly a happy thought struck me: it was to write a novel, in which only the actual spirit of the narration should be retained, rejecting all expletives, flourishes, and ornamental figures of speech; to be terse and abrupt in style—use monosyllables always in preference to polysyllables—and to eschew all heroes and heroines whose names contain more than four letters. Full of this idea, on my returning home in the evening, I sat to my desk, and before I retired to rest, had written ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various


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