taciturn

comparative more taciturn · superlative most taciturn

1. Silent; temperamentally untalkative; disinclined to speak.

   The two sisters could hardly have been more different, one so boisterous and expressive, the other so taciturn and calm.

   3 more examples

   We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.

   1813, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 18

   We spent a lot of time up on the staging of the great furnaces, trying to pick up the tricks of the trade from the taciturn furnacemen who sat around placidly smoking, or chewing twist, and occasionally throwing in more pig iron to the molten white-hot metal.

   1945 January and February, A Former Pupil, “Some Memories of Crewe Works—III”, in Railway Magazine, page 14

   To say that Cavendish’s distaste for hype and self-promotion extended to his personal life would be an understatement. The statesman Lord Henry Brougham observed in 1845 that his taciturn colleague “uttered fewer words in the course of his life than any man who lived to fourscore years, not at all excepting the monks of La Trappe.”

   2015, Steve Silberman, chapter 1, in Megan Newman, editor, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, New York: Avery, →ISBN, page 24

   Synonyms: reticent, untalkative, reticent, unloquacious, untalkative, quiet, reserved, silent · Antonyms: garrulous, loquacious, talkative, prolix