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terse |
3 definitions found From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: 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.] Many stones, . . . although terse and smooth, have not this power attractive. --Sir T. Browne. 2. Refined; accomplished; -- said of persons. [R. & Obs.] ``Your polite and terse gallants.'' --Massinger. 3. Elegantly concise; free of superfluous words polished to smoothness; as terse language; a terse style. Terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence. --Macaulay. A poet, too was there whose verse Was tender, musical, and terse. --Longfellow. 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: ``In eight terse lines has Ph[ae]drus 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.'' -- {Terse"ly}, adv -- {Terse"ness}, n. From WordNet r 1.6 [wn]: 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}] From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (13 Mar 01) [foldoc]: Terse Language for decryption of hardware logic. ["Hardware Logic Simulation by Compilation", C. Hansen, 25th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conf, 1988].
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