terse: [17] Terse originally meant ‘polished, smooth’ (‘This man … so laboured upon it that he left it smooth and terse’, Helkiah Crooke, Description of the Body of Man 1615). By the 18th century, however, the associated notion of ‘neatness’ had led on to ‘neatly concise’. The word’s present-day negative connotations of ‘brusqueness’ seem to be a comparatively recent development. It was borrowed from tersus, the past participle of Latin tergēre ‘wipe’ (source also of English detergent). => detergent
