Synonyms

in a nutshell

Idioms

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.

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

To sum up their misfortune in a nutshell, Bradley was taken off at half-time after a knock for Isak.

From BBC

That right there kind of sums up my life in a nutshell.

From Literature

And there you have it: superlatives, in a nutshell.

From Literature

It means “I came, I saw, I conquered,” and Caesar meant it as a pithy description of a battle, which, in a nutshell, he won.

From Literature

That was the pitch in a nutshell: Home prices didn’t even need to fall.

From Literature

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023