- coarse
- coarse, vulgar, gross, obscene, ribald are comparable when applied to persons, their language, or behavior and mean offensive to a person of good taste or moral principles.Coarse is opposed to fine not only with reference to material things (as fiber, texture, or structure) but also with reference to quality of mind, spirit, manners, or words; it implies roughness, rudeness, crudeness, or insensitivity{
whose laughs are hearty, though his jests are coarse— Pope
}{simple parables of the coarse businessman and the sensitive intellectual— De Vote
}{some of the royal family were as coarse as the king was delicate in manners— Henry Adams
}Vulgar (see COMMON 3) suggests something that is offensive to good taste or decency, frequently with the added implication of boor- ishness or ill breeding{Caliban is coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar— Hazlitt
}{Burns is often coarse, but never vulgar— Byron
}{it was, in fact, the mouth that gave his face its sensual, sly, and ugly look, for a loose and vulgar smile seemed constantly to hover about its thick coarse edges— Wolfe
}Gross (see FLAGRANT) is opposed to fine in the sense of delicate, subtle, ethereal; it implies either a material, as contrasted to a spiritual, quality or a bestiality unworthy of man{the grosser forms of pleasure— Wharton
}{gross habits of eating
}{Caliban ... is all earth, all condensed and gross in feelings and images— Coleridge
}{my anger and disgust at his gross earthy egoism had vanished— Hudson
}Obscene stresses more strongly the idea of loathsome indecency or utter obnoxiousness{the war to him was a hateful thing . . . waged for the extension of the obscene system of Negro slavery— Parrington
}{an obscene allusion
}{the jest unclean of linkboys vile, and watermen obscene— Pope
}{the rabble of Comus . . . reeling in obscene dances— Macaulay
}{it was, of course, easy to pick out a line here and there . . . which was frank to indecency, yet certainly not obscene— Canby
}Ribald suggests vulgarity and often such impropriety or indecency as provokes the laughter of people who are not too fastidious{a ribald folksong about fleas in straw— Lowes
}{their backs . . . shaking with the loose laughter which punctuates a ribald description— Mary Austin
}{we stare aghast, as in the presence of some great dignitary from behind whom, by a ribald hand, a chair is withdrawn when he is in the act of sitting down— Beerbohm
}Analogous words: rough, crude, *rude, raw, green, callow, uncouth: *rank, rampant: boorish, loutish, clownish (see under BOOR)Antonyms: fine: refined
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
