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say it: RUHF-nuhs
roughness is a noun meaning "a texture of a surface or edge that is not smooth but is irregular and uneven". It is pronounced /ˈɹʌfnəs/ — RUHF-nuhs. It carries 7 recorded senses.
a texture of a surface or edge that is not smooth but is irregular and uneven
the quality of being harsh or rough or grating to the senses
an unpolished unrefined quality
“the crudeness of frontier dwellings depressed her”
used of the sea during inclement or stormy weather
rowdy behavior
the formation of small pits in a surface as a consequence of corrosion
harsh or severe speech or behavior
“men associate the roughness of nonstandard working-class speech with masculinity”
“the roughness of her voice was a signal to keep quiet”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for roughness come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.