All 13 Uses of
brief
in
The Scarlet Letter
- Some of the briefer articles, which contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honours of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines, of such antique date, that they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty again.†
Chpt Intr. *
- Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not character of less force and solidity than her own.†
Chpt 2
Uses with a very common or rare meaning:
- One brief sigh sufficed to carry off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences.†
Chpt Intr.
- His pervading and continual hope—a hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death—is, that finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office.†
Chpt Intr.
- After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature.†
Chpt 3
- The next instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain; for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew.†
Chpt 5
- Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests—one, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember as having taken a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne's disgrace; and, in close companionship with him, old Roger Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who for two or three years past had been settled in the town.†
Chpt 8
- After a brief pause, the physician turned away.†
Chpt 10 *
- The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.†
Chpt 15
- For the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration.†
Chpt 17
- So brief a journey would bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayest still be happy!†
Chpt 17
- But, on this occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul.†
Chpt 20
- It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:— "ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"†
Chpt 24
Definitions:
-
(meaning too common or rare to warrant focus) Brief is most commonly encountered as an adjective meaning "of short duration." Other meanings derive from the idea of short--as when making a long story short by summarizing it, or when wearing briefs (underwear).
-
(brief as in: briefed her) to give a summary of important information to someone