terse

Wizened and creased, with a hoop the size of a quarter dangling in his left ear, he relies on gestures—shrugs, grimaces, guffaws—to flesh out responses that lean terse.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 6, 2026

In rare cases, their votes are revealed in terse indications that they grant or deny the application, or even more rarely, as an opinion.

From Salon ● Jul. 3, 2026

Maresca can often come across as distant and terse when dealing with the media.

From BBC ● Jun. 29, 2026

Instead of consulting, DHS sent a single terse email to the State Department, which did not even cover the topic of a country’s safety and instead asked about any general “foreign policy concerns.”

From Slate ● Jun. 25, 2026

Their strident quoiks drifted down from above as Osha washed and cleaned and bandaged the maester's wounds, under Luwin's terse instruction.

From "A Game of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin

Not exactly a warm embrace of the new Warsh Fed: terser “just the facts” statements, shorter news conferences, no forward guidance, and a no-nonsense message that there’s a new sheriff in town.

From Barron's ● Jun. 18, 2026

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, whom I asked separately, had a terser response: “I’m gonna leave that to the medics.”

From Slate ● May 16, 2023

Some of his friends noticed a change in his writing style — a change that one scholar later described as a departure from “sustained argument and prolonged reflection” to a terser “telegram style.”

From Washington Post ● Dec. 29, 2022

Sherman used a similar metaphor, but terser: “I feel like I’m starving.”

From New York Times ● Jul. 7, 2021

Still terser, but hardly less expressive, is Emerson's characterization of Lincoln as one who had been "permitted to do more for America than any other American man."

From The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln A Narrative And Descriptive Biography With Pen-Pictures And Personal Recollections By Those Who Knew Him by Francis F. (Francis Fisher) Browne

The tersest analysis of Christie’s entry in the race has come from Christie’s target, Trump.

From Slate ● Jun. 7, 2023

A man crying also furnishes the Bible with its shortest, tersest line: “Jesus wept.”

From The New Yorker ● Oct. 4, 2018

During a post-debate gaggle, the tersest Gillespie got was when a reporter tried to get clarity on whether he plans to invite Trump to the state.

From Washington Post ● Sep. 21, 2017

Mr. Tillerson is in many ways the personality opposite of Mr. Kerry: When asked a hard question he will offer the tersest answer possible, rather than attack with words.

From New York Times ● Apr. 12, 2017

So it came about that all the old classical works were composed in the tersest of language, as remote as can be imagined from the speech of the people.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" by Various