Brachylogia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The use of concise, abbreviated wording in which words are deliberately left out while the meaning remains clear
2. A style of speaking or writing that compresses language by dropping words that the listener can easily supply
3. Extreme conciseness of phrasing, achieved by omitting superfluous or implied words from a sentence or passage

Etymology: Ancient Greek writers on rhetoric used this term for a way of speaking so compressed that listeners must supply the missing words themselves. The Greek is a transparent compound: "brakhys", meaning short, joined to "logos", meaning speech or word, the same "logos" that ends "biology" and "theology". English took the term directly from Greek, so it keeps the literal sense of "short speech." The "brakhys" half appears in other technical English words. "Brachycephalic", describing a short, broad skull, is built from the same root, as is the rarer "brachylogy", a close variant of this word. Such terms show how scholarly English was assembled from Greek building blocks, so a reader who knows those two Greek words can often work out the meaning at a glance.

Synonyms: brevity, conciseness

Antonyms: periphrasis