Dictionary

coarseness en · NOUN

Etymology

Etymology tree English coarse Proto-Germanic *-inōną Proto-Indo-European *-dyé- Proto-Germanic *-atjaną Proto-Indo-European *-tus Proto-Germanic *-þuz Proto-Germanic *-assuz Proto-Germanic *-inassuz Proto-West Germanic *-nassī Old English -nes Middle English -nesse English -ness English coarseness From coarse + -ness.

Meanings

1. (uncountable, usually) The property of being coarse, roughness or primitiveness, unrefined or unpolished.
2. (uncountable, usually) The quality or state of being coarse
   • All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill. It was ugly, gross. […] Never before had he felt such repulsion when the vicar displayed his characteristic bluntness or coarseness of speech. In the present connection—[…]—such talk had been distressingly out of place. 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XXIV, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC, pages 198–199:
   • coarseness of food, texture, manners, or language
   • The great bulk of Lenin's published work consists of attacks and polemics. The reader is invariably struck by the coarseness and aggressiveness of his style, which are unparalleled in the whole literature of socialism. 1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume II: The Golden Age, Oxford: Clarendon Press, translation of Główne nurty marksizmu: rozwój (in Polish), →ISBN, →OCLC, page 520:
3. (countable, usually) Something that is coarse.
   • This sketch is rather coarse, but probably it is as little exaggerated as could be expected from Walpole. The society which it illustrates abounded with such coarsenesses. Princesses were not expected to exhibit much propriety—nor Duchesses to be overburthened with delicacy. 1851, Eliot Warburton, “Walpole in Paris”, in Memoirs of Horace Walpole and His Contemporaries; […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 304:
   • Hogarth does not refrain from introducing a sign in his engraving “Noon,” of 1738, showing the Baptist’s head on a charger, with the cynical inscription “Good Eating.” Whether such coarsenesses were actually perpetrated, even under the lax régime of Charles II in England, when frivolity reigned after the fall of Cromwell, it is hard to decide. 1916 November, Fritz Endell, “Ecclesiastical Hospitality and Its Signs”, in Old Tavern Signs: An Excursion in the History of Hospitality, [Boston, Mass.]: Houghton Mifflin Company, →OCLC, pages 73–74:
   • In fact, Angela Lansbury’s bawdy, chattering, equivocal Granny—a super opportunity glintily grasped—is as likely to entertain young Rosaleen with such coarsenesses as ‘. . . and she found another husband not too shy to piss into a pot’ as to scare her with warnings about men whose eyebrows meet: […] 1984 September 21, John Coleman, “Films”, in New Statesman, volume 108, London, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 41, column 3:

Forms

Translations (6)

nb grovhet (quality of being coarse) · ga boirbe (quality of being coarse) · da grovhed (quality of being coarse) · es aspereza (quality of being coarse) · ota بیاغیلق (quality of being coarse) · pdt Groffheit (quality of being coarse)