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Definition of "short-winded" [short•-wind•ed]

  • Breathing with quick labored breaths. (adjective)
  • Likely to have difficulty in breathing, especially from exertion. (adjective)
  • Brief and succinct. (adjective)
  • Choppy; disconnected. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "short-winded" in a sentence
  • "The Roundtable is fun to participate in and you can be as long or short-winded as you like."
  • "His last valet was a big, foundered, short-winded fellow of fifty-five, who was incapable of running twenty paces; but, as he had been born at Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him"
  • "In tertian fever, the morbific cause seeking the heart in the first instance, and hanging about the heart and lungs, renders the patient short-winded, disposed to sighing, and indisposed to exertion, because the vital principle is oppressed and the blood forced into the lungs and rendered thick."