visual dictionary · four sizes of saying it
Each word keeps a real speech bubble where a letter should be — because a bubble can hold one mark or a thousand. Scroll, and watch it grow.
01 · /ləˈkɒnɪk/ · adjective
Saying it in as few words as possible — and not one more.
Calvin Coolidge — ‘Silent Cal’ — at a dinner party
she bet
…he said
You lose.A woman bet she could get him to say more than two words. He said exactly two: “You lose.” The bet was settled.
Laconic isn't shy, and it isn't rude. It's precision — the speaker trusts the words to do their work, not one extra syllable invited. The bubble stays empty on purpose.
from Laconia — the Spartans, who were famous for it
02 · /ləˈkweɪʃəs/ · adjective
Fond of talking — the temperament that fills any silence.
one quick thing, I promise —
The friend who calls to say one quick thing and is still going forty minutes later. You don't really mind.
Unlike verbose, this isn't about the words on a page — it's a temperament. A warmth. Loquacious people talk because silence feels like a room left empty.
from Latin loquī, to speak
03 · /vɜːˈbəʊs/ · adjective
Using more words than the meaning ever asked for.
the answer, as needed
Yes.
— the answer, as given
It is, on balance and after due consideration of the relevant particulars, not inaccurate to suggest that the answer would appear — barring any unforeseen developments, and I want to be perfectly clear that I am committing to nothing here — to be, broadly and provisionally speaking, very probably affirmative.
Verbose is a sin of quantity, not character. Every line here would survive being cut in half; most would survive being cut to a word. The bubble is bigger than it needs to be — that's the whole point.
04 · /ˈprəʊlɪks/ · adjective
So long-winded it turns reading into a chore.
why he was late — in his own words
So the thing you have to understand, and I really do mean this as essential background without which the rest of the account simply cannot be properly appreciated, is that the morning had already, from the very first moment the alarm went off — which, and this is itself a small story, it did not in fact do, owing to a sequence of events involving the phone, the charger, and a decision made the previous evening that seemed, at the time, entirely reasonable — begun on something of an unpromising footing, such that by the time I had located my keys, which were not, as you might expect, on the hook by the door where they are meant to live and where, in principle, I always intend to leave them, but rather, as it turned out after a search of some duration, inside yesterday's coat, the situation had developed a momentum of its own that no amount of subsequent hurrying could meaningfully arrest.
(…and so on, for a considerable while longer.)
Where verbose merely overpacks, prolix exhausts. The crime isn't length — it's the toll it takes on the listener.
Verbose wastes words. Prolix wastes yours. The bubble was already full of lines before he started — and he just kept ruling more.
from Latin prōlixus, poured forth
From a single mark to a paragraph that won't end — every one of them is a speech bubble. The only choice a speaker ever makes is how big to blow it.
laconic · loquacious · verbose · prolix