in a nutshell

In summary; concisely. In a nutshell, the app helps you to plan parties. I don't want the long version—just tell me what your thesis is in a nutshell.

To summarize or describe something in only a few words. To put it in a nutshell, the servers are crashing because of an issue with our power supply. Let me put it in a nutshell for you—if you show up late again, you're fired!

Fig. [of news or information] in a (figurative) capsule; in summary. This cable channel provides the latest news in a nut shell. In a nut shell, what happened at work today?

Concisely, in a few words, as in Here's our proposal-in a nutshell, we want to sell the business to you. This hyperbolic expression alludes to the Roman writer Pliny's description of Homer's Iliad being copied in so tiny a hand that it could fit in a nutshell. For a time it referred to anything compressed, but from the 1500s on it referred mainly to written or spoken words.

COMMON You say in a nutshell when you are describing something very briefly. She wants me to leave the company. I want to stay. That's it in a nutshell. I don't know what I'm doing and I guess that's the problem in a nutshell.

In a few words; concisely: Just give me the facts in a nutshell.

Concisely or compactly, usually referring to written or spoken words. The Roman writer Pliny in his Natural History stated that Homer’s great (and very long) epic poem, the Iliad, was copied in such tiny handwriting that the whole text could be enclosed in a nutshell. This obvious hyperbole caught the imagination of numerous subsequent writers who referred to “the Iliad in a nutshell,” among them Jonathan Swift and Thomas Carlyle. Later “the Iliad” was dropped and anything extremely compressed was described as being in a nutshell, a cliché since the mid-nineteenth century. See also in a word.