Concise
adjective /kənˈsaɪs/ — Saying exactly what needs to be said, and stopping.
Definition
Giving a lot of information clearly and in few words; brief but comprehensive.
Beyond the definition
Concise writing and speaking is harder than verbose writing and speaking. You have to know what matters. The concise person respects their audience's time — and usually, more gets heard.
Origin & history
From Latin concisus — cut up small (con- + caedere 'to cut'). Literally: cut to the necessary parts.
Example sentences
Illustrative sentences for learning, not verified community posts or sourced quotations.
Her email was concise and devastating — two sentences, no room for misunderstanding.
Good design is concise — it includes exactly what's needed and nothing else.
He'd learned to make concise arguments; people listen more when you don't waste their time.
How to use it
This entry uses an adjective. Follow the examples for the nouns it describes and its position in the sentence.
Choose “Concise” when the meaning fits your context: Giving a lot of information clearly and in few words; brief but comprehensive.
Synonyms
Antonyms
verbose, wordy, rambling
Related words
Concise vs brief
Brief simply means short in duration or length — a brief meeting, a brief note. Concise means short and complete: it has everything it needs and nothing it doesn't. A brief answer might miss the point; a concise answer hits it exactly in as few words as possible. Brief is a measure of length; concise is a measure of both length and adequacy. The goal of good writing isn't to be brief — it's to be concise.
Word in the Wild
Illustrative story: an imagined scene, not a documented event or interview.
The report had been forty-three pages. The senior partner sent it back with one comment: "This should be five pages. Not because the information isn't important — because important information loses when it's buried."
The analyst rewrote it in a day. The five-page version was harder to write and clearer to read. The board read it and made the decision the forty-three page version had somehow obscured.
The senior partner framed it this way: "The length of a document is inversely related to the confidence of the person who wrote it. When you know what you think, you can say it in a paragraph. When you don't, you write forty-three pages hoping the answer is in there somewhere."
Questions about this word
What does "Concise" mean?
Concise is adjective meaning: Saying exactly what needs to be said, and stopping.. Giving a lot of information clearly and in few words; brief but comprehensive.
Where does the word "Concise" come from?
From Latin concisus — cut up small (con- + caedere 'to cut'). Literally: cut to the necessary parts.