brevis

Brevis, breve is third declension with two terminations: masculine and feminine share brevis, the neuter is breve, ablative singular brevi, genitive plural brevium. Comparative brevior, superlative brevissimus, adverb breviter.

The one idiom to bank is brevi standing alone for "shortly, before long", with tempore understood. Watch the spelling in the sources: this corpus writes breuis, breue and breui, because manuscripts use u for both the vowel and the consonant, and the lemma is still brevis. Of water, brevis means shallow rather than short, which is where the noun brevia, "shoals", comes from. English took brief, breviary, abbreviate and, through legal French, the brief a barrister carries.