prose

plural proses

1. uncountableusuallyLanguage, particularly written language, not intended as poetry.

   Though known mostly for her prose, she also produced a small body of excellent poems.

   1 more example

   ...Or if Sion Hill Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow’d Faft by the Oracle of God; I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th’ Ionian Mounts while it pursues Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime...

   1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost (1st ed)

2. uncountableusuallyLanguage which evinces little imagination or animation; dull and commonplace discourse.

   ...the vehicle is plodding prose, but the effect is none the less poignant. And in regard to this I may say that in a hundred places in Trollope the extremity of pathos is reached by the homeliest means.

   1888, Henry James, Partial Portraits, Macmillan

3. uncountableusuallyCatholicismA hymn with no regular meter, sometimes introduced into the Mass.

   Proses are parts of the Office of the Mass which are sung just before the Gospel, upon great Festivals. The French also call those Rhythmical Hymns Proses, which are sung in their Offices in the Church of Rome, in which Rhime only, and not Quantity of Syllables, is observed.

   1699, A new ecclesiastical history

present singular third person proses · participle present prosing · participle past prosed · past prosed

1. To write or repeat in a dull, tedious, or prosy way.

   Pray, do not prose, good Ethelbert, but speak; What is your purpose?

   1819, John Keats, Otho the Great, act I, scene II, verses 189-190

   1 more example

   Already he felt himself near to being a celebrity. He had astonished Eton. That was a good beginning. Papa might prose, knowing, of course, nothing of the poetry of caricature, of the wild joys and the laurels that crown the whimsical. So while Mr. Lane hunted adjectives, and ran sad-sounding and damnatory substantives to earth, Eustace hugged himself, and secretly chuckled over his pilgrim's progress towards the pages of Vanity Fair.

   1896, Robert Smythe Hichens, The Folly of Eustace

plural Proses

1. A surname from German.