not reaching a point, mark, target, or the like; not long enough or far enough.
9.
below the standard in extent, quantity, duration, etc.: short measure.
10.
having a scanty or insufficient amount of (often followed by in or on): He was short in experience.
11.
being below a necessary or desired level; lacking: The office is short due to winter colds and flu.
12.
Cookery.
a.
(of pastry and the like) crisp and flaky; breaking or crumbling readily from being made with a large proportion of butter or other shortening.
b.
(of dough) containing a relatively large amount of shortening.
13.
(of metals) deficient in tenacity; friable; brittle.
14.
(of the head or skull) of less than ordinary length from front to back.
15.
Stock Exchange.
a.
not possessing at the time of sale commodities or stocks that one sells.
b.
noting or pertaining to a sale of commodities or stocks that the seller does not possess, depending for profit on a decline in prices.
16.
Phonetics.
a.
lasting a relatively short time: “Bit” has a shorter vowel-sound than “bid” or “bead.”
b.
belonging to a class of sounds considered as usually shorter in duration than another class, as the vowel of but as compared to that of bought, and in many languages serving as a distinctive feature of phonemes, as the a in German Bann in contrast with the ah in Bahn, or the t in Italian fato in contrast with the tt in fatto (opposed to long).
c.
having the sound of the English vowels in bat, bet, bit, hot, but, and put, historically descended from vowels that were short in duration.
17.
Prosody.
a.
(of a syllable in quantitative verse) lasting a relatively shorter time than a long syllable.
Origin: before 900; Middle English schort (adj.), Old English sceort; cognate with Old High German scurz short, Old Norse skortr shortness, scarcity
Related forms
short·ness, noun
o·ver·short, adjective
o·ver·short·ness, noun
un·short, adjective
Synonyms 4.Short,brief are opposed to long, and indicate slight extent or duration. Short may imply duration but is also applied to physical distance and certain purely spatial relations: a short journey. Brief refers especially to duration of time: brief intervals. 5. terse, succinct, laconic, condensed. 6. curt, sharp, testy. 7. poor, deficient, inadequate, wanting, lacking. 12. crumbly. 14. brachycephalic.
Meaning "electrical short circuit" first recorded 1854 (the verbal phrase short circuit is recorded from 1867). Slang meaning "car" is attested from 1897; originally "street car," so called based on street cars (or the rides taken in them) being "shorter" than railroad cars.
n. a small drink of hard liquor or of beer. : I'll have a short and a pack of cigarettes.
mod. having to do with a single drink of undiluted liquor. : I'll take mine short, innkeeper.
n. a purchase of drugs that counts or weighs out less than the amount agreed upon. : You gave me a short. Fix it now, or this thing goes off accidentally in your ear.
tv. to give someone less of something than was agreed upon. : They shorted us on the last order, so we switched suppliers.
n. a car. (Streets.) : Man, that's some short you got!
n. the sale of borrowed shares of stock; a short sale. (Securities markets.) : There is a lot of covering of shorts this week. After that the market is in for a steady decline.
tv. to sell borrowed stock. (Securities markets.) : The way the deficit is running, I'd short the whole market.
Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Richard A. Spears.Fourth Edition. Copyright 2007. Published by McGraw Hill.
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