All 11 Uses of
brief
in
War and Peace
Uses with a very common or rare meaning:
- This pleasure will be but a brief one, however, for he will leave, us again to take part in this unhappy war into which we have been drawn, God knows how or why.†
Chpt 1
- He had often begun to make reflections or think aloud in her company, and she had always answered him either by a brief but appropriate remark—showing that it did not interest her—or by a silent look and smile which more palpably than anything else showed Pierre her superiority.†
Chpt 3
- After a brief description of the campaign and the two battles in which he had taken part, and his promotion, Nicholas said that he kissed his father's and mother's hands asking for their blessing, and that he kissed Vera, Natasha, and Petya.†
Chpt 3
- On the eighteenth and nineteenth of November, the army advanced two days' march and the enemy's outposts after a brief interchange of shots retreated.†
Chpt 3
- They put questions and gave brief replies about things they knew ought to be talked over at length.†
Chpt 5
- Prince Bolkonski listened as a presiding judge receives a report, only now and then, silently or by a brief word, showing that he took heed of what was being reported to him.†
Chpt 8
- Prince Andrew's second letter, written near Vitebsk after the French had occupied that town, gave a brief account of the whole campaign, enclosed for them a plan he had drawn and forecasts as to the further progress of the war.†
Chpt 10
- A personal, human feeling for a brief moment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served so long.†
Chpt 10 *
- To all these inquiries he gave brief and angry replies indicating that orders from him were not now needed, that the whole affair, carefully prepared by him, had now been ruined by somebody, and that that somebody would have to bear the whole responsibility for all that might happen.†
Chpt 11
- If it were an example taken from the history of China, we might say that it was not an historic phenomenon (which is the historians' usual expedient when anything does not fit their standards); if the matter concerned some brief conflict in which only a small number of troops took part, we might treat it as an exception; but this event occurred before our fathers' eyes, and for them it was a question of the life or death of their fatherland, and it happened in the greatest of all known…†
Chpt 14
- Not only her look, but her exclamations and the brief questions she put, showed Pierre that she understood just what he wished to convey.†
Chpt 15
Definition:
-
(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).