short of something
short
adverb
us/ʃɔrt/

shortadverb (LENGTH)

[ -er/-est only ]
in a way that makes something short in length, distance, or height:
She decided to cut her hair short.

shortadverb (TIME)

[ not gradable ]
before the arranged or expected time or place:
I started to say something, but he cut me short (= stopped me from continuing).

short | Business English

short
adjective
uk /ʃɔːt/us
[ not before a noun ]
not having enough of something that you need:
be short of sthWe are very short of staff and if we face a major incident we'll be stretched.
be short on sthThe Budget was short on announcements about personal taxes.
leave sth short of sthThe rocky economy has left the state so short of money that it must cut spending.
[ not before a noun ]
not available or not large enough in number or amount:
The most common ways of ending an interview are saying that time is short.
Those from well-off homes tend to be spendthrift even when money is short.
less than a particular amount:
short of sthThe charity raised just short of €7m last year.
STOCK MARKET
used to describe the selling of shares that you have borrowed, hoping that their price will fall before you buy them back and return them to their owner, making a profit:
In a short sale, an investor can sell stock he doesn't own, hoping to buy the shares at a cheaper price later on.
used to describe a shorter form of a name or word:
short for sthAmi is short for artificial machine intelligence.
for shortKeep an eye on Canada's Northern Telecom, Nortel for short.
 at short notice(US alsoon short notice)
with little warning:
Many start-up companies need the freedom to hire and fire staff at short notice.
 in short supply
not available in large amounts or numbers:
Temporary workers are in short supply.
If you can offer talents that are in short supply, you are in a strong position.
short
adverb
uk /ʃɔːt/us
STOCK MARKET
if you sell shares short, you sell shares that you have borrowed, hoping that their price will fall before you buy them back and return them to their owner, making a profit:
The group's conservative growth portfolio isn't allowed to sell stocks short.
A popular hedge fund move is to go short.
go short on sthSpeculators are going short on the Hong Kong dollar.
 run short
if you run short of something, you have too little of it left:
The bank has been plagued for months by speculation that it is running short of capital.
if something runs short, there is little of it left:
Time is for a deal to get done.
In two months food will run short.
short
verb[ T ]
uk /ʃɔːt/us
STOCK MARKET
to sell shares that you have borrowed, hoping that their price will fall before you buy them back and return them to their owner, so that you make a profit:
As many as 27% of the company's shares have been shorted.

Examples of short

short
Most of the agriculture practiced here is short-term rice and manioc followed by 4- 7 y of fallow.
Unfortunately, it is difficult in a short space to do justice to a book which already is a philosophical classic.
Limited almost exclusively to problems of spatial perception, that analysis gives short shrift to even the most fundamental issues of psychological or physiological import.
After a short pause the two stimuli were given in reversed positions, again 25 choices were recorded and correct choices rewarded.
Such studies have been very useful in mapping the cognitive architecture of human short-term memory to specific brain regions.
In short, there appear to be two possible ways of generalising beyond the findings reported here.
After five familiarization trials, five short and five long lines were presented in random sequence.
Supersonic ionization wave driven by radiation transport in a short-pulse laser-produced plasma.
Following their emission, positrons travel for a short distance that is defined by their energy and the surrounding tissue.
To replicate simultaneously individual pitches or short melodic patterns after an auditory stimulus involves fewer synthesis skills and requires less self-monitoring over time.
From even that short perspective, several things about bop had become clearer.
In short, early damage to the left (or right) hemisphere when there is normal plasticity tends to lead to recovery with no longlasting gross deficits.
In short, the age differences reside in the particulars of the environment and timing demands of the tasks.
Pitch-matching tasks require a child to echo individual pitches or short melodic patterns provided by an auditory stimulus.
Prototypes are also quite important in that they provide a frame of reference for linguistic quantifiers such as tall, short, old and so on.
See all examples of short
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.