Word.ws English Dictionary

short and sweet

short and sweet adjective: efficiently brief in duration, especially when referring to a task that becomes unpleasant when prolonged.

Adjective

short and sweet (comparative more short and sweet or shorter and sweeter, superlative most short and sweet or shortest and sweetest)

  1. Efficiently brief in duration, especially when referring to a task that becomes unpleasant when prolonged.
    • The staff meeting was short and sweet today.
    • Our conversation was short and sweet / It nearly swept me off-a my feet1975, Bob Dylan, “You're a Big Girl Now”, in Blood on the Tracks

Forms of short and sweet

comparativemore short and sweet
comparativeshorter and sweeter
superlativemost short and sweet
superlativeshortest and sweetest

Questions about short and sweet

What does short and sweet mean?
Short and sweet means efficiently brief in duration, especially when referring to a task that becomes unpleasant when prolonged.
What part of speech is short and sweet?
Short and sweet is an adjective.

Words near short and sweet in the dictionary

  1. short a
  2. short a's
  3. short accounts make long friends
  4. short and
  5. short and curlies
  6. short and sweet
  7. short ands
  8. short appoggiatura
  9. short arm
  10. short arms
  11. short back and sides

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: short and sweet (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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