terse

Webster's Dictionary (1913)

Origin: L. tersus, p. p. of tergere to rub or wipe off.

1. Appearing as if rubbed or wiped off; rubbed; smooth; polished. obsolete

Many stones,... although terse and smooth, have not this power attractive.— Sir Thomas Browne

2. Refined; accomplished; — said of persons. rare & obsolete “Your polite and terse gallants.” Philip Massinger

3. Elegantly concise; free of superfluous words; polished to smoothness; as, terse language; a terse style.

Terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence.— Thomas Babington Macaulay

A poet, too, was there, whose verse Was tender, musical, and terse.— Henry W. Longfellow

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.”

— Terse′wb-a1′>′ly, adverb — Terse′wb-a1′>′ness, noun

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), from GCIDE 0.54

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

Language for decryption of hardware logic.

["Hardware Logic Simulation by Compilation", C. Hansen, 25th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conf, 1988].