make a long story short

1. Get to the point, as in To make a long story short, they got married and moved to Omaha. Although the idea of abbreviating a long-winded account is ancient, this precise phrase dates only from the 1800s. Henry David Thoreau played on it in a letter of 1857: “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long time to make it short.”

Example Sentences

To make a long story short, in this book Lewis doesn’t exercise any.

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“To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ‘67 Corvette, and my cat,” he continued.

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“To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette, and my cat,” Mr. Biden said with a chuckle.

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“To make a long story short,” she said, “it was not cool at all.”

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I felt total sympathy for the Ukrainian journalist who plaintively asked at the news conference: “Can we make a long story short and give Ukraine all capabilities it needs and liberate all territories sooner rather than later?”

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Related Words

• abbreviate 
• compress 
• curtail 
• cut 
• cut back 
• cut down 
• lessen 
• minimize 
• reduce 
• shrink 
• slash 
• trim