rough

This is a flat adverb: rough does the work that roughly usually does. It is at home in the phrase sleep rough, as in Walter Scott's Woodstock (1826), "sleeping rough on the trenches." With verbs of handling, as in treat them rough, it sounds casual. In careful writing roughly is the safer choice.

The verb usually travels with a particle: rough in the shape first, then polish the details. The construction marks the first stage of work that will be finished later, so it often sits in a two-step sentence. It shares its idea with the "approximate, unfinished" adjective and the artist's preliminary sketch.

An idiom more than a free verb: the sense lives almost entirely in the fixed phrase rough it, where it is an empty object pointing to nothing in particular. The phrase inflects normally (roughing it, roughed it). In Katherine Mansfield's "The Escape" (1920), a wife reports that her husband "likes roughing it." It suggests discomfort taken on willingly, for a camping trip or a journey.

Studio shorthand turns the "approximate, unfinished" adjective into a countable noun: a rough, two roughs. In the making of an illustration it sits between the thumbnail and the finished art. It is larger and more worked out than the first, but still provisional. An art director can reject roughs freely, because nothing final has yet been committed.

In ice hockey the offense has a name, roughing, and the verb means committing it. The act is specific: punching another player. That is narrower than the general excess of force covered by the boxing and wrestling verb. Readers following a game will meet the penalty's name more often than the verb on its own.

This is a ring-sport term, and it is intransitive: a boxer or wrestler roughs, with no object. The gerund roughing names the offense itself. The California State Athletic Commission's boxing rules of 1938 state that "roughing is not a part of the sport, and will not be tolerated." Ice hockey has its own penalty of the same name in the hockey verb.

Here the cause is drink. It is the same British and Irish slang as the general "unwell" sense, narrowed to the morning after. Feel rough is the usual frame, often strengthened: absolutely rough, properly rough. If the night before is never mentioned, a listener may hear plain illness instead. The drinking usually has to be clear from context.

This is slang from British and Irish speech. It describes how someone feels or looks rather than giving a diagnosis: you feel rough, or you look a bit rough. It belongs in casual conversation, so in writing or with a doctor, unwell is the safer word. It overlaps with the hangover sense, and only context tells a listener which one is meant.

Here the adjective has become a countable noun for a person: a rough, a couple of roughs. In H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), "a couple of sturdy roughs" bawl the news of catastrophe down Wellington Street. The word suits a loud street crowd of that kind. Rowdy, its near-synonym, has made the same move from adjective to noun.

This is a cricket term, and it nearly always takes the article: a spinner aims at the rough or bowls into the rough. The bowlers make the patch themselves, because their feet keep landing in the same place. The longer the bowling goes on, the more there is to exploit. It is the uneven texture of the plain "not smooth" sense, given a fixed place on the pitch.

This is cavalry talk. Charles James's A New and Enlarged Military Dictionary (1802) gives "to rough horses" as "a word in familiar use among the dragoons" for breaking horses in for military purposes. It is transitive: one roughs a horse. Its home was the regiment's stable yard rather than general speech.

This adjective survives in a single fixed term, rough breathing. That is the grammarians' name, Latin spiritus asper, for the mark ῾ written over an initial vowel or rho. Its counterpart is the smooth breathing, which marks the absence of the h-sound. The pair is learned together, and outside this term the adjective has no Greek use of its own.

This is a farrier's word, and it has a verb to match. The verb, roughing a horse's shoes, names the job of making a shoe grip, and the noun names the piece that does the gripping. Both meanings share a single purpose: they deliberately turn the uneven texture of the adjective into safe footing on slippery ground.

A noun for bad weather that English has since let go. Phineas Fletcher, in 1633, sets it against its opposite: "In calms you fish; in roughs use songs and dances." Like calm, it was countable, and its plural meant spells of stormy weather. Today the "turbulent" adjective does this work, as in rough weather. Used as a noun now, it reads as deliberate period flavor.