Brief

1. v. t. To make an abstract or abridgment of; to shorten; as, to brief pleadings.
2. a. Short in duration.
3. a. Concise; terse; succinct.
4. a. Rife; common; prevalent.
5. adv. Briefly.
6. adv. Soon; quickly.
7. a. A short concise writing or letter; a statement in few words.
8. a. An epitome.
9. a. An abridgment or concise statement of a client’s case, made out for the instruction of counsel in a trial at law. This word is applied also to a statement of the heads or points of a law argument.
10. a. A writ; a breve. See Breve, n., 2.
11. 1v. t. 1 To make an abstract or abridgment of; to shorten; as, to brief pleadings.
12. 1a. 1 Short in duration.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.