How many of the words in your last email were actually doing a job?
That’s the question this word is really about, and it’s a different question from the one about length.
Verbose. From the Latin verbosus, and at its heart is verbum — a word. That’s all. Verbose means full of words. Wordy, in the most literal possible sense: stuffed, crowded, packed with words.
And notice that the definition says nothing about length. That’s the thing people miss. A short sentence can be thoroughly verbose. At this present moment in time is verbose, and it’s six words. Now is one. Nothing about the meaning changed; five words were standing around doing nothing.
So verbosity isn’t a measure of size. It’s a ratio. Words per unit of meaning. And you can violate it in a single line as easily as in a forty-minute talk.
Once you see it as a ratio, you start hearing it everywhere, and mostly in the little joints of language. Due to the fact that — because. In the event that — if. Has the ability to — can. At the end of the day — nothing at all, that one’s pure filler wearing a suit.
I find something quietly funny about the root here, too. Verbum is also where we get verb — the part of speech that acts, that does the work of a sentence, the engine. So the word for language that isn’t doing anything comes from the same root as the word for the part of language that does everything.
Which is a decent way to think about it, actually. In any sentence, some words are verbs in spirit — they’re carrying load. And some are just present. They came to the meeting, they sat down, they didn’t contribute.
Now, why do we do it?
The most common reason isn’t laziness. It’s deference. Verbosity is very often politeness that has calcified into procedure. We inflate because plainness feels rude. I want becomes I was wondering whether it might be possible to. And the padding is doing real social work — it’s softening, it’s leaving the other person room to refuse, it’s signaling that we know we’re asking for something.
That’s not nothing. I want to be honest about it.
The second reason is seriousness. There’s a widespread and largely false belief that important things must sound complicated. So when the topic feels weighty — a legal matter, a medical letter, a company announcement — the language swells to match the perceived gravity. Institutions do this constantly. The register goes formal, the sentences go passive, and by the end nobody can tell what was decided or by whom.
And the third reason is cover. This is the one worth watching in yourself. The more words there are, the more places there are to retreat to. If you say a thing plainly and it turns out to be wrong, you’re standing there with it. If you say it in ninety words with three qualifications, you can always point at a different part of the sentence and say that’s not what I meant.
Plain words commit you. That’s why we avoid them, and that’s why they’re trusted.
Now — the defense. Because I don’t want this to become a sermon about efficiency, and there’s a real danger in that direction.
Not every extra word is dead weight. A great deal of what looks verbose is actually ceremony, and ceremony is not waste.
Think of the long greetings in many cultures — the questions about the family, the health, the house, all of it before anyone gets to the point. An efficiency expert would strike every line. But those words aren’t carrying information; they’re carrying relationship. They’re saying: you are not a transaction to me. I have time for you.
Strip that out and you don’t get clarity. You get a colder place. And I’d point at the modern workplace as evidence — a great deal of communication there has been ruthlessly de-verbed and reads like instructions to a machine, and it hasn’t made anybody feel more respected.
So the test can’t simply be could this be shorter. Almost everything could be shorter. The test is: what is each word doing? Because a word can be doing something other than delivering information. It can be doing warmth. It can be doing courtesy, or care, or the simple work of making a hard sentence survivable.
Those words are working. They’re just not working on the content.
What’s genuinely verbose is the word doing nothing — the phrase that adds no meaning, no warmth, no music, no softening. Just occupying space because it’s the sort of thing that gets written.
And I’d add one more category to protect, which is music. Sometimes a sentence carries an extra beat because the rhythm needs it. That’s not padding either; that’s shape. Language isn’t only a delivery system, and the shortest version of a sentence is frequently the least memorable one.
So the discipline I’d offer isn’t brevity. It’s auditing. Go through and ask, of the words you’re most tempted to defend: is this doing meaning, warmth, or music? If it’s doing one of the three, keep it, cheerfully. If it’s doing none, it isn’t a word. It’s furniture.
And most of us have a lot of furniture.
So here’s what I’ll leave you with tonight. Think of the phrases you reach for automatically — the ones that arrive in your writing without being invited, the openings and softeners and connective bits you’ve typed a thousand times.
Pick one. Just one. And ask it, honestly: what have you ever done for me?
Because if the answer is nothing — if it’s neither carrying meaning nor carrying warmth — then the real question is more interesting than grammar. It’s this: what were you actually putting there instead of saying the thing?
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