crass

From Middle English cras, craas, from Old French cras, from Latin crassus (“dense, thick, gross, fat, heavy”). Doublet of grease.

• IPA^(key): /kɹæs/, /kɹɑːs/

• Audio (Southern England):

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• Rhymes: -æs

crass (comparative crasser, superlative crassest)

1. Coarse; crude; unrefined or insensitive; lacking discrimination (in the third sense of the word).

   Antonyms: delicate, sensitive, refined

   • 2002, Mike Tyson to the Media:

     You guys would rather be with someone else who’s equal to your status in life. Tiger Woods, or somebody. I comes across as crass, a Neanderthal, a babbling idiot sometimes. I like to show you that person. I like that person.

2. Materialistic.
3. Dense.
4. Lacking finesse; crude and obvious.
   • 1895 July, Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses”, in North American Review:

     8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale.

   • 1900, William Gilbert, chapter 11, in On the Magnet‎:

     One may very easily fall into mistakes and errors when one is searching into the hidden causes of things, in the absence of real experiments, and this is easily apparent from the crass error of Cardan; who deems himself to have discovered the distances of the centres of the cosmos and of the earth through a variation of the magnetick iron of 9 degrees.

   • 2018 September 7, Tom English, “Scotland 0-4 Belgium”, in BBC Sport‎:

     The Albanians have a world ranking of 58, but even a side of fairly modest talents would surely have taken advantage of the kind of crass mistakes that Scotland made on Friday.

• crassly
• crassness

• Carss, csars, scars