Word of the Day
: July 1, 2025verbose
playWhat It Means
Someone described as verbose tends to use many words to convey their point. Verbose can also describe something, such as a speech, that contains more words than necessary.
// The article documenting their meeting presented an odd exchange between a verbose questioner and a laconic interviewee.
verbose in Context
"The dense, verbose text—over which some actors stumbled, understandably, on opening night—created a dizzying journey through a war between gods and mortals fought across time and place." — Rosa Cartagena, The Philadelphia Daily News, 19 Feb. 2025
Did You Know?
There's no shortage of words to describe wordiness in English. Diffuse, long-winded, prolix, redundant, windy, repetitive, rambling, and circumlocutory are some that come to mind. Want to express the opposite idea? Try succinct, concise, brief, short, summary, terse, compact, or compendious. Verbose, which falls solidly into the first camp of words, comes from the Latin adjective verbōsus, from verbum, meaning "word." Other descendants of verbum include verb, adverb, proverb, verbal, and verbicide ("the deliberate distortion of the sense of a word").
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Word Family Quiz
What relative of verbose is an adverb that means "in the exact words" or "word for word"?
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