Terse \Terse\, a. [Compar. Terser; superl. Tersest.] [L.
tersus, p. p. of tergere to rub or wipe off.]
1. Appearing as if rubbed or wiped off; rubbed; smooth;
polished. [Obs.]
[1913 Webster]
Many stones, . . . although terse and smooth, have
not this power attractive. --Sir T.
Browne.
[1913 Webster]
2. Refined; accomplished; -- said of persons. [R. & Obs.]
"Your polite and terse gallants." --Massinger.
[1913 Webster]
3. Elegantly concise; free of superfluous words; polished to
smoothness; as, terse language; a terse style.
[1913 Webster]
Terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence.
--Macaulay.
[1913 Webster]
A poet, too, was there, whose verse
Was tender, musical, and terse. --Longfellow.
[1913 Webster]
Syn: Neat; concise; compact.
Usage: 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:
[1913 Webster]
"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."
[1913 Webster] It differs from concise in not
implying, perhaps, quite as much condensation, but
chiefly in the additional idea of "grace or elegance."
[1913 Webster] --
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
terse
adj : brief and to the point; effectively cut short; "a crisp
retort"; "a response so curt as to be almost rude";
"the laconic reply; `yes'"; "short and terse and easy
to understand" [syn: crisp, curt, laconic]
WordNet (r) 2.0
106 Moby Thesaurus words for "terse":
Attic, Ciceronian, Spartan, abbreviated, abridged, abrupt,
aphoristic, aposiopestic, axiomatic, bluff, blunt, brief, brusque,
chaste, classic, clear, clear-cut, clipped, close, close-tongued,
closemouthed, compact, compendious, compressed, concentrated,
concise, condensed, contracted, crisp, curt, cut, direct,
distilled, docked, dumb, easy, economical of words, elegant,
elliptic, epigrammatic, finished, formulaic, formulistic, gnomic,
graceful, gracile, gruff, incisive, indisposed to talk, laconic,
lean, limpid, lucid, mum, mute, natural, neat, pellucid,
perspicuous, petulant, pithy, plain, platitudinous, pointed,
polished, precise, proverbial, pruned, pungent, pure, quiet,
refined, reserved, restrained, round, rude, sententious, short,
short and sweet, shortened, silent, simple, snug, sparing of words,
speechless, straightforward, succinct, summary, synopsized,
taciturn, tart, tasteful, taut, tight, tight-lipped, to the point,
tongue-tied, trim, truncated, unaffected, ungracious, unlabored,
unloquacious, untalkative, word-bound, wordless
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
Terse
Language for decryption of hardware logic.
["Hardware Logic Simulation by Compilation", C. Hansen, 25th
ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conf, 1988].
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03)
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