Other forms: rougher, roughest
Rough is what your hand tells you when it runs over something uneven: bark, sandpaper, an unshaved chin, a wall that was never plastered. Smooth is the opposite, and your fingers know the difference before your eyes do.
From touch the word spreads everywhere. A rough estimate, a rough idea, a rough draft is approximate and unfinished rather than exact. A rough day, a rough night, a rough patch is hard to get through, and I feel rough means ill or hungover. Rough also means violent: rough handling, a rough part of town, a rough sea that throws the boat about. British English adds sleep rough, to sleep outdoors with nowhere to live. The adverb roughly nearly always means about, as in roughly ten miles, so keep it apart from the sense of force.
1adjectiveroughUneven or coarse to the touch, not smooth.~40%
“The rough stone scraped his palm.”
2adjectiveapproximateApproximate; not exact or not finished.~54%
“Can you give me a rough idea of the cost?”
synonyms: approximate
3adjectivedifficultDifficult and unpleasant to live through.~2%
“She had had a rough week and wanted an early night.”
4adjectivebrutalViolent, or done with too much force.~2%
“The referee warned them twice about rough play.”
synonyms: brutal, heavy-handed
5adjectivewildWild and not calm, said of weather and water.~2%
“The crossing was rough and half the passengers were sick.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 7 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Rough is old English through and through: Old English ruh, from Proto-Germanic ruhaz. Its cousins are still alive next door in Dutch ruig, German rau and Scots ruch, all with the same meaning. The gh in the spelling is left over from a throaty sound English stopped making centuries ago.
Proto-Germanic
*rūhaz
Old English
rūg
Middle English
rough
English, today
rough
From Middle English rough, roughe, roȝe, row, rou, ru, ruȝ, ruh, from Old English rūg, rūh, from Proto-Germanic rūhaz. Cognate with Scots ruch, rouch (“rough”), stq ruuch, rouch (“rough”), West Frisian rûch (“rough”), Low German ruuch (“rough”), Dutch ruig (“rough”), German rau (“rough”), Danish ru (“uneven on the surface, "rough", "rugged"”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA