PITHY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Pithy

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/pˈɪθi/ Listen

adjective

Pithy adj. (compar. pithier; superl. pithiest)

Consisting wholly, or in part, of pith; abounding in pith; as, a pithy stem; a pithy fruit.

Having nervous energy; forceful; cogent. "This pithy speech prevailed, and all agreed." "In all these Goodman Fact was very short, but pithy."

Pithy gall (Zool.), a large, rough, furrowed, oblong gall, formed on blackberry canes by a small gallfly (Diastrophus nebulosus).

See images of 'Pithy'

Etymology of 'Pithy'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar

"Pithy" Quotes from Famous Books

... meetings of the Cabinet was often relieved, and troublesome matters before it were illuminated, by some apt and pithy story. Secretary Welles tells of such an occasion when "Seward was embarrassed about the Dominican [sic] question. To move either way threatened difficulty. On one side was Spain, on the other side the negro. The President remarked that the dilemma ...

— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... significant circumstance, that these attempts had hitherto failed mainly by reason of the casualties to which sailing-vessels were always exposed. He pressed upon their attention the change which steam-navigation had recently wrought in naval warfare. He quoted the pithy remark of Lord Palmerston, that "steam had converted the Channel into a river, and thrown a ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... is obtained by tapping the fruit stem of the cabo negro palm. The process is very simple. At the time of efflorescence the spadix is cut off and the pithy stem is tapped. This operation lasts from 15 to 30 minutes each day and is continued for from 7 to 14 days. After the tapping the stem must be bent into a downward position. This is effected by inclining it downward every day, a piece of rattan or vine being used to retain ...

— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... too fast. That coiling is perhaps prepared for some kind of uncoiling; and I will try if I can't learn something about it from some other book—noticing, as I pause to think where to look, the advantage of our English tongue in its pithy Saxon word, 'pith,' separating all our ideas of vegetable structure clearly from animal; while the poor Latin and French must use the entirely inaccurate words 'medulla' and 'moelle'; all, however, ...

— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... street and up Chrystie, and down Delancey to where he lived. And there his women folk, a bibulous mother and three dingy sisters, pounced upon him for his wages. And at his confession they shrieked and objurgated him in the pithy rhetoric of the locality. ...

— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

More quotes...