Laconic

 WORD OF THE DAY

laconic / adjective / luh-KAH-nik

Definition
: using or involving the use of a minimum of words : concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious

Examples
“The genius of ‘Wall-E’ lies in its ability to inspire empathy with a pair of robots that can speak only a few words. It helps that Wall-E and Eve are both extremely cute, as robots go; if the trash cube robot didn’t have those giant, sad basset hound eyes, we wouldn’t have cared if he found love. But the cutest and most laconic robot of ‘Wall-E’ is the Axiom’s custodian, M-O.”
— Michael Baumann, The Ringer, 13 June 2022

… towards the father—laconic, authoritarian, remote, an immigrant who'd trained in Galicia to be a rabbi but worked in America in a hat factory—their feelings were more confused.
— Philip Roth, Granta 24, Summer 1988

Did You Know?
We’ll keep it brief. Laconia was an ancient country in southern Greece.
Its capital city was Sparta, and the Spartans were famous for their terseness of speech.
Laconic comes to us by way of Latin from Greek Lakōnikos, meaning “native of Laconia.”
In current use, laconic means “terse” or “concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious,” and thus recalls the Spartans’ taciturnity.