coarse
Often confused with course
- 1Rough in texture rather than smooth.
The blanket was woven from coarse wool that scratched her neck.
His beard had grown coarser and grayer over the winter.
Note
The texture sense began with cloth. Coarse was once simply a spelling of course, meaning ordinary, and the two parted only in the 18th century; ordinary cloth was the rough, heavy kind, like the strongest and coarsest linen Jonathan Swift's Lilliputians quilted into shirts in 1726. From cloth it passed to wool, hair and beards. Its opposites are smooth and fine, and the sound-alike course never takes this meaning.
- 2Made up of large particles or grains rather than fine ones.
Mix the cement with coarse sand and gravel for the foundation.
The coarser sediments settled first, leaving the fine silt on top.
Oppositefine
Note
Grain size is the point here, and the word is always measured against fine: coarse sand against fine silt, coarse meal against sifted flour. The adverb coarsely does the same work (coarsely granulated wheat), and the comparative is a working term in sedimentology, where moving water drops the coarser material first and the finer material last.
- 3Showing a lack of refinement, good taste, or delicacy.
His coarse jokes made several guests at the dinner visibly uncomfortable.
Critics found the film's humor coarser than anything the director had made before.
Similarcrude, vulgar, crass, rude, uncouth
Oppositerefined, delicate, genteel
Note
The social sense began as a spelling of course: what followed the usual course was ordinary, the ordinary was common, and the common came to look unrefined; the same road that mean traveled. The two spellings parted in the 18th century. Today the word sits most naturally before manners, language, jokes and humor, and John Walker, in 1791, was already pairing it with vulgar.
- 4
Less common meaning
- 5Of a metal, still in an unrefined state.
The smiths melted down the coarse silver and skimmed off the dross.
Wagons carried the coarse lead from the mine to the refinery downriver.
Note
An archaic use, found only of metal: coarse silver or lead was metal still carrying its dross, waiting for the refinery. It is the "lacking refinement" meaning taken literally. Modern writing says crude or unrefined instead, and a reader today would hear coarse metal as rough to the touch, so the old sense is one to recognize in older texts rather than to use.
Practice
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Origin
An adjectival use of course whose spelling split off in the 18th century. The meaning moved from "(following) the usual course", as in of course, to "ordinary, common" and then "lacking refinement"; the sense "not fine, granular" came from its use about cloth. Compare how mean developed.