WORD OF THE DAY: COMPENDIOUS

WORD OF THE DAY: COMPENDIOUS

adjective   |   kum-PEN-dee-us

A compendious book, research paper, article, etc. is one that provides most or all of the information one may want or require. Similarly, a person might be said to have compendious knowledge of a subject if they have a full and wide-ranging—that is, comprehensive—grasp of it. Compendious can also describe something that is both comprehensive and concise, as in “a compendious summary.”

// The coveted book prize was awarded to a compendious history of environmental literature in the United States.

EXAMPLE OF COMPENDIOUS

“For much of a career that spanned decades, he pursued the oscines, or songbirds, of the Neotropics to their habitats in the Southern Hemisphere—sketching, making compendious field notes, and amassing a vast file of images that he used as a reference tool when painting the plates for definitive books …” — Guy Trebay, The Boston Globe, 26 July 2026

DID YOU KNOW?

When Noah Webster titled his first dictionary, published in 1806, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, he used compendious to mean “short, brief, concise, summary,” as he defined it on the book’s 58th page. This may come as a surprise given that compendious is now most often used to mean “comprehensive” and is applied to books, papers, etc. that are quite lengthy. But Webster’s Compendious Dictionary was no more than a preparation for his two-volume An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), and compendious traces back to the Latin adjective compendiōsus, meaning “both comprehensive and succinct.” Webster’s title signaled that his debut word compendium would be useful, if not exhaustive. Today, however, compendious asserts comprehensiveness, typically without brevity.

Merriam  Webster Dictionary