Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Vulgarity.
- n. A crudely indecent word or phrase; an obscenity.
- n. A word, phrase, or manner of expression used chiefly by uneducated people.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Coarseness, rudeness, or grossness of manners; vulgarity; commonness.
- n. A phrase or expression used only in common colloquial, especially in coarse, speech.
Wiktionary
- n. A word or term that is considered offensive or vulgar.
- n. A spelling, word, or phrase used in common speech that is considered improper or incorrect for formal communication.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Grossness; rudeness; vulgarity.
- n. A vulgar phrase or expression.
WordNet 3.0
- n. the quality of lacking taste and refinement
- n. an offensive or indecent word or phrase
Examples
“To use a vulgarism which is stripped of its vulgarity if employed reverently, as I would do it -- we know where to have Him.”
“Just because Dawg is a jerk does not make Chiapas a "sak-o-xit", a poorly phrased vulgarism if there ever was one.”
““Sarah Palin is a [sexual vulgarism deleted]” — good one!”
“To the points about “Black Hole” as a name for a Gravitational Singularity and its surrounding event horizon: I have heard tell that one objection to the term was that it translated into a French vulgarism for vagina.”
“If the Board of Education wants its teachers to instruct adolescents about HIV using Latinism of the academy, excluding vulgarism of the street, it should tell them so, plainly.”
The Volokh Conspiracy » Sex Education, Dirty Words, and the Due Process Clause
“When a shock jock uses the word coger, does it mean "take hold of," as it does in Madrid, or is it a vulgarism for copulating, as in Buenos Aires?”
“Chief Justice John Roberts asked how the FCC justified punishing some programs for airing a fleeting expletive, while clearing the CBS "Early Show" when it broadcast a vulgarism uttered by a reality-show contestant.”
The Wall Street Journal: Justices Appear Split Over Impact of TV Vulgarity
“He says that those who hear the vulgarism subliminally consider the literal meaning very briefly, "but then ignore it," he says.”
The Wall Street Journal: Don't Read His Lips -- You Might Be Offended
“Using a vulgarism, he asks, "What am I doing it for?”
“But (if I may use a vulgarism) one swallow makes no summer: five righteous were formerly necessary to save a city, and they could not be found; so, till I find four more such righteous widows as yourself, I shall entertain my former notions of widowhood in general.”
Letters to his son on The Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘vulgarism’.
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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-ism's -logies
acosmism, absurdism, absolutism, ableism, aestheticism, alarmism, allotheism, anachronism, animalculism, analogism, animatism, animism and 464 more...
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