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roughness

noun

Simple meaning

The quality of being harsh or rough or grating to the senses.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

ruhfnuhs

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US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

ˈɹʌfnəs

This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

noun

  1. The quality of being harsh or rough or grating to the senses

  2. The property of being rough, coarseness.

  3. Something that is rough; a rough spot.

  4. countableengineering

    A measure of how rough something is, such as a surface

  5. us

    Roughage; coarse fodder.

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
C2 · Proficient
Frequency
Uncommon
Typical Use
Primarily written

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: The quality of being harsh or rough or grating to the senses

Used this way, roughness is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.

Emotional tone
Neutral
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Not strongly marked
How common
Moderately common
Connotation
Matter-of-fact
Usage feel
Neutral and straightforward

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

More ways to use roughness

  • “Men associate the roughness of nonstandard working-class speech with masculinity.”noun

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

surface roughnessroughness lengthrelative roughnessroughness elementsroughness coefficientinterface roughnessroughness heightbed roughness

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Word family

Words built from the same root.

  • roughlyadverbDerived adverb

    Imprecise but fairly close to correct.

More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin

Synonyms

Sense: being harsh or rough

harshness

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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.