in a nutshell

1. Concisely, in a few words, as in Here's our proposal—in a nutshell, we want to sell the business to you. This hyperbolic expression alludes to the Roman writer Pliny's description of Homer's Iliad being copied in so tiny a hand that it could fit in a nutshell. For a time it referred to anything compressed, but from the 1500s on it referred mainly to written or spoken words.

Related Words

• brusque 
• concise 
• cryptic 
• curt 
• elliptical 
• incisive 
• laconic 
• pithy 
• precise 
• succinct 
• trenchant