parsimonious

Adjective

parsimonious (comparative more parsimonious, superlative most parsimonious)

1. Exhibiting parsimony; sparing in the expenditure of money; frugal, possibly to excess.
   • He was regular in his habits, parsimonious, and industrious; but he lacked all talent needed at the bar—he had neither address, nor eloquence, nor ingenuity.1838 (date written), L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter VI, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], published 1842, →OCLC, page 68
   • Our fathers would have an economical government, even if grand people called it a parsimonious one, and taxes should be no greater than were absolutely necessary to pay for such a government.1898, William Graham Sumner, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”, in War and Other Essays, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, published 1911, →OCLC, page 333

   Synonyms:

   penurious, niggardly, stingy, pennywise, tight-fisted, abstemious, canny, chary, moderate, cheap

2. Using a minimal number of assumptions, steps, or conjectures.
   • Statistical methods offer the ability to enforce parsimonious selection of the most influential potential predictors of each gene's state.2006, Richard Bonneau et al., “The Inferelator: An Algorithm for Learning Parsimonious Regulatory Networks from Systems-biology Data Sets de Novo”, in Genome Biology, volume 7, number 5, London...
3. Not conceding many goals.
   • They played like a team that was in a hurry to get back to the Premier League. Norwich City had dismantled the most parsimonious defence in the Championship inside the opening quarter of an hour and at the final whistle it was the yellow end, rather than Middlesbrough’s banks of red, where the...2015 May 25, Daniel Taylor, “Norwich reach Premier League after early blitz sees off Middlesbrough”, in The Guardian, London, archived from the original on 26 May 2015