slimsy

Pronounced: SLIM-see, adj

Notes: I didn’t know that this was a word

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Yesterday’s word

The word telegraphese is “language characterized by the terseness and ellipses that are common in telegrams”

First usage

Our word came into English in the late 1800s

Background / Comments

These days, we have email and texting and Twitter (X) to communicate. In the 1800s, people used the telegraph communicate with someone far away; telegraph came from the Greek words tele (distant) and graphe (writing). The message sent was called a telegram (tele again and gramma [letter]). Telegrams were expensive — one paid by the number of words — so people used various schemes to communicate with a minimal number of words. Our word arose to describe any kind of language that was similarly brief.