Etymology Journal ยท I
In a nutshell
Meaning
- Providing a concise summary of something complicated. It means boiling the whole story down to the absolute essentials.
Concise, helpful
Used in a sentence
- In a nutshell, we are broke and need a new plan.
- That's the project in a nutshell.
- Can you give me the report in a nutshell?
The backstory
The phrase refers to the idea of carving or fitting an entire manuscript onto a surface as small as a nutshell. It has been a standard idiom for brevity for centuries.
Heard in
Nationwide
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