Word.ws English Dictionary

pithiest

pithiest is the superlative form of pithy.

Meaning of pithy

Adjective

pithy (comparative pithier, superlative pithiest)

  1. Concise and meaningful.
    • Mr. Lamb, on the contrary, being "native to the manner here," though he too has borrowed from previous sources, instead of availing himself of the most popular and admired, has groped out his way, and made his most successful researches among the more obscure and intricate, though certainly not the...1825, William Hazlitt, “Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon”, in The Spirit of the Age […] , London: Printed for Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC
  2. Of, like, or abounding in pith; spongy or having small holes or pits.
    • Must we know the torrid zone only through travelled bananas, plucked too soon and pithy? or by bottled anacondas? or by the tarry-flavored slang of forecastle-bred paroquets?1863, Theodore Winthrop, “The Heart of the Andes”, Part 2 – Introduction, published posthumously in Life in the Open Air and other papers
  3. (Scotland, archaic) Vigorous, powerful, strong; substantial.
    • His bairns a’ before the flood / Had langer tack o’ fleſh and blood, / And on mair pithy ſhanks they ſtood / Than Noah’s line, / Wha ſtill hae been a feckleſs brood / Wi’ drinking wine.1773 January 21, R[obert] Fergusson, “Caller Water”, in The Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement, Edinburgh: […] Wal[ter] Ruddiman, →OCLC, page 114, column 2

Questions about pithiest

What is pithiest the superlative form of?
Pithiest is the superlative form of pithy.

Words near pithiest in the dictionary

  1. pithiatic
  2. pithiatism
  3. pithiatisms
  4. Pithie
  5. pithier
  6. pithiest
  7. pithily
  8. pithiness
  9. pithinesses
  10. pithing
  11. Pithion

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pithiest (page history and authors); pithy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “pithiest.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pithiest. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.