parsimonious

Etymology

parsimony + -ious

adj

1. Exhibiting parsimony; sparing in the expenditure of money; frugal to excess.
   Our fathers would have an economical government, even if grand people called it a parsimonious one, and taxes should be no greater than were absolutely necessary to pay for such a government. 1898, William Graham Sumner, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”, in War and Other Essays, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, published 1911, →OCLC, page 333
   The first three college-savings plans stand out for their parsimonious expenses […] 2002 January, “55 great personal-finance ideas”, in Kiplinger's Personal Finance, volume 56, number 1, Washington, D.C.: Kiplinger Washington Editors, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 53, col. 3
2. Using a minimal number of assumptions, steps, or conjectures.
   Statistical methods offer the ability to enforce parsimonious selection of the most influential potential predictors of each gene's state. 2006, Richard Bonneau et al., “The Inferelator: An Algorithm for Learning Parsimonious Regulatory Networks from Systems-biology Data Sets de Novo”, in Genome Biology, volume 7, number 5, London: BioMed Central, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, →PMID, →PMCID, page R36
3. (sports) Not conceding many goals.
   They played like a team that was in a hurry to get back to the Premier League. Norwich City had dismantled the most parsimonious defence in the Championship inside the opening quarter of an hour and at the final whistle it was the yellow end, rather than Middlesbrough’s banks of red, where the euphoria could be found. 25 May 2015, Daniel Taylor, “Norwich reach Premier League after early blitz sees off Middlesbrough”, in The Guardian, London, archived from the original on 2015-11-01