shorter

Pluralshorters

1. 1
   adjective

   Comparative of short.

   The new route to the office is shorter than the old one.

   Days grow noticeably shorter as winter approaches.

   Note

   The regular -er comparative, and it carries every meaning of short with it: a shorter route, a shorter man, a shorter meeting, a shorter form of a word, even a delivery bowled shorter in cricket, bouncing farther from the batsman. The standard of comparison follows with than. The same spelling also names two people, the short seller and the coin clipper, and only those nouns take the plural shorters.

2. 2
   nouncolloquialcountable

   One who engages in short selling, aiming to profit when a security's price declines.

   The shorter borrowed the shares, sold them high, and bought them back cheaper.

   Hedge fund shorters circled the struggling retailer for months.

   Similarbear

   Oppositebull

   Note

   A market colloquialism that sits beside two more settled names for the same trader: short seller and, more tersely, a short. In careful financial writing those are the safer choices. Shorter belongs to talk among traders, where it often appears in the plural, as when shorters pile into a weakening stock.

3. 3
   nounobsoleteUK

   A person who made dishonest money by clipping and filing small amounts of metal from coins.

   The magistrate sentenced the shorter for trimming silver from every coin he handled.

   Back-alley shorters slowly bled value from the realm's currency.

   Note

   A piece of British underworld slang, long obsolete, from the trade in clipped coin. George Borrow's The Romany Rye (1858) shows it in a pack, "a gang of shorters," with a matching verb beside it: they "shortened money." Use it only in historical writing or period dialogue. A modern reader meeting it cold will hear the stock-market short seller instead.

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