Other forms: briefing, briefs, briefed, briefer
To brief someone is to tell them what they need to know before they go and do it. Pilots are briefed on the weather; a lawyer briefs a client on the courthouse steps; a team gets five minutes at the start of the shift.
Brief is better known as an adjective meaning short in time: a brief meeting, a brief phone call, I will be brief. As a noun, your brief is the job you have been given and its limits — that is outside my brief — and in Britain a brief is also the written instructions handed to a barrister. The meeting itself is a briefing, and briefly is the adverb. Watch the plural: briefs are underpants. And brief is about duration, not size, so a visit can be brief but a person cannot; for people, use short.
1verbbriefTo give someone the information they need before they act.~2%
“The team was briefed on the changes before the shift began.”
2adjectiveshortLasting a short time.~58%
“There was a brief pause before she answered.”
synonyms: short
3adjectiveusingUsing few words.~38%
“His reply was brief and cold.”
4nountaskThe task someone has been given, together with its limits.~2%
“Redesigning the whole site was never part of our brief.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense (9 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Brief came through Old French from Latin brevis, short, and behind that an Indo-European root meaning the same. English received that word more than once: breve, the long note in old musical notation, and — of all things — merry are doublets of brief.
Proto-Indo-European
*mreǵʰ-
Middle English
bref
English, today
brief
From Middle English bref. From Middle English breef, breve, bref, from Old French brief, bref, from Latin brevis (“short”), from Proto-Indo-European mréǵʰus (“short, brief”). a doublet of breve and merry.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA