Meanings
plural coarsenesses
- uncountableusuallyThe property of being coarse, roughness or primitiveness, unrefined or unpolished.
- uncountableusuallyThe quality or state of being coarse
coarseness of food, texture, manners, or language
2 more examples
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 198–199The 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 - countableusuallySomething 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 3042 more examples
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 73–74In 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
Synonyms & antonyms
nounthe quality of being composed of relatively large particles
nounlooseness or roughness in texture (as of cloth)
nounthe quality of lacking taste and refinement
Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.
Origin
Translations
Danish grovhed
- grovhedquality of being coarse
Irish boirbe
- boirbequality of being coarse
Norwegian Bokmål grovhet
- grovhetquality of being coarse
Spanish aspereza
- asperezaquality of being coarse
Rhymes & wordplay
Anagrams
Cite this entry
coarseness. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/coarseness
“coarseness.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/coarseness. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “coarseness,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/coarseness.
Source: coarseness on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.