in a word

Wambaugh’s characters were morally flexible, heroic, repugnant, compassionate, callous, deeply flawed, darkly comical — in a word, real.

"He said, 'mum, in a word, I was in hell.'"

Attached to Smith’s final report was a letter given to the attorney general in which Smith pushed back against Trump’s incessant accusations that his investigation was influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors: To those who knew him well, Trump’s accusations were, “in a word, laughable,” Smith wrote.

In a word, yes, calories matter.

In one 2008 experiment, for example, defensive pessimists performed relatively poorly in a word puzzle when prompted to imagine a positive scenario, but they did much better, on average, when they were prompted to imagine the opposite, negative effect.