curt [LME] ‘In more temperate climes, hair is curt’, writes Sir Thomas Herbert in his 1665 account of his travels in Africa and Asia, reflecting curt’s original meaning, ‘short or shortened’. The word comes from Latin curtus ‘cut short, abridged’, source also of curtail [LME]. By the 19th century you could use curt to describe people who were not only concise or brief in what they were saying, but rudely so.