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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Terse \Terse\, adjective [Compar. {Terser}; superl. {Tersest}.] [L. tersus, p. p. of tergere to rub or wipe off.]
1. Appearing as if rubbed or wiped off; rubbed; smooth; polished. [Obs.]
Many stones, . . . although terse and smooth, have not this power attractive. --Sir T. Browne.
2. Refined; accomplished; -- said of persons. [R. & Obs.] ''Your polite and terse gallants.'' --Massinger.
3. Elegantly concise; free of superfluous words; polished to smoothness; as, terse language; a terse style.
Terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence. --Macaulay.
A poet, too, was there, whose verse Was tender, musical, and terse. --Longfellow.
Syn: Neat; concise; compact.
Usage: {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 Ph[ae]drus 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"ly}, adverb -- {Terse"ness}, noun
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
terse
adjective: brief and to the point; effectively cut short; "a crisp retort"; "a response so curt as to be almost rude"; "the laconic reply; 'yes'"; "short and terse and easy to understand" [syn: {crisp}, {curt}, {laconic}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
106 Moby Thesaurus words for "terse": Attic, Ciceronian, Spartan, abbreviated, abridged, abrupt, aphoristic, aposiopestic, axiomatic, bluff, blunt, brief, brusque, chaste, classic, clear, clear-cut, clipped, close, close-tongued, closemouthed, compact, compendious, compressed, concentrated, concise, condensed, contracted, crisp, curt, cut, direct, distilled, docked, dumb, easy, economical of words, elegant, elliptic, epigrammatic, finished, formulaic, formulistic, gnomic, graceful, gracile, gruff, incisive, indisposed to talk, laconic, lean, limpid, lucid, mum, mute, natural, neat, pellucid, perspicuous, petulant, pithy, plain, platitudinous, pointed, polished, precise, proverbial, pruned, pungent, pure, quiet, refined, reserved, restrained, round, rude, sententious, short, short and sweet, shortened, silent, simple, snug, sparing of words, speechless, straightforward, succinct, summary, synopsized, taciturn, tart, tasteful, taut, tight, tight-lipped, to the point, tongue-tied, trim, truncated, unaffected, ungracious, unlabored, unloquacious, untalkative, word-bound, wordless
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:
Terse Language for decryption of hardware logic. ["Hardware Logic Simulation by Compilation", C. Hansen, 25th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conf, 1988].
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