compendious
/kəmˈpɛndɪəs
/adjective formal
Containing or presenting the essential facts of something in a comprehensive but concise way: a compendious study...
- In An American Dilemma, a compendious study of American racism, another foreign observer, Sweden's Gunnar Myrdal, recognized the self-correcting nature of what he too called the American Creed.
- This book details the social lives of children and includes compendious and informative summaries of attachment theory, friendship formation, group power and function, gender issues, and child psychology.
- Our learned friends seek to restrict the word ‘obvious’ to the most narrow meaning possible - that is not the way it has been dealt with - and our friends ignore the fact that it is a compendious concept.
Synonyms
succinct, pithy, short and to the point, short and sweet, potted, thumbnail, brief, crisp, compact, concise, condensed, shortened, contracted, compressed, abridged, abbreviated, summarized, summary, abstracted;
in a nutshell, in a few well-chosen words
informal snappy
rare lapidary, epigrammatic, synoptic, aphoristic, gnomic
Derivatives
compendiously
- While the appellants' experience will in that event have been insupportably painful they will have endured the consequence of adjudication through due processes in accordance with what is compendiously termed the rule of law.
- For convenience, I shall refer to these dates compendiously as the ‘date of loss’, although I recognise that the term is not altogether appropriate in a case of restitution…
- In short the claim was more extensive than the invention and was, as it is compendiously expressed, too wide and therefore invalid.
compendiousness
- It is a shame to miss the compendiousness and convincingness of the picture, of the crumbling - crummy - amalgam of dark and dry, of what is there and what is lost.
- Within the lifetime of men now living, a miracle of creeping compendiousness occurred in copywriting.
- It has the depth and compendiousness of a textbook, with the readability and poignance of a novel.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Old French compendieux, from Latin compendiosus 'advantageous, brief', from compendium 'profit, saving, abbreviation'.