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coarseness

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Etymology

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From coarse +‎ -ness.

Noun

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coarseness (usually uncountable, plural coarsenesses)

  1. The property of being coarse, roughness or primitiveness, unrefined or unpolished.
  2. The quality or state of being coarse
    coarseness of food, texture, manners, or language
    • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XXIV, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC, pages 198–199:
      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.
  3. (countable) Something that is coarse.
    • 1851, Eliot Warburton, “Walpole in Paris”, in Memoirs of Horace Walpole and His Contemporaries; [], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, [], →OCLC, page 304:
      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.
    • 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:
      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.
    • 1984 September 21, John Coleman, “Films”, in New Statesman, volume 108, London, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 41, column 3:
      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: []

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Anagrams

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