Word of the Day

: November 1, 2018

verbose

adjective ver-BOHSS

What It Means

1 : containing more words than necessary : wordy; also : impaired by wordiness

2 : given to wordiness

verbose in Context

"[The] text … is verbose and vague, and so comically overheated that it can feel like a parody of late Tennessee Williams, when that playwright's florid style had graduated to full rococo." — Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2018

"But Tuesday's overly verbose—let's call it a diatribe—portrayed Brown in a light we haven't seen to this point. He was visibly frustrated and completely exasperated, as if, in that particular moment, he decided to unfurl eight years of pent up anger and indignation." — Pro Football Weekly, 13 June 2018

Did You Know?

There's no shortage of words to describe wordiness in English. Diffuse, long-winded, prolix, redundant, windy, repetitive, rambling, and circumlocutory are some that come to mind. Want to express the opposite idea? Try succinct, concise, brief, short, summary, terse, compact, or compendious. Verbose, which falls solidly into the first camp of words, comes from Latin verbosus, from verbum, meaning "word." Other descendants of verbum include verb, adverb, proverb, verbal, and verbicide (that's the deliberate distortion of the sense of a word).