short shrift

1. 1.

   a brief and unsympathetic rejection

   “they made short shrift of my request”

   Synonymssummary treatment

   Broaderrejection

Questions about short shrift

What does short shrift mean?

short shrift means "a brief and unsympathetic rejection".

What is another word for short shrift?

Close synonyms include summary treatment. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is short shrift a common word?

short shrift is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.