coarsening
coarsening is the present participle and gerund of coarsen.
Meaning of coarsen
Verb
coarsen (third-person singular simple present coarsens, present participle coarsening, simple past and past participle coarsened)
- To make (more) coarse.
- She appeared to be neither wooden nor stationary, but a singing spirit, young and fresh, passing through the jungle. No violence coarsened her; no power domineered to wither her. She was graciously feminine.1941, Emily Carr, Klee Wyck, Chapter 6 "D'Sonoqua," http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100131h.html
- To become (more) coarse.
- He was intolerable now except under the influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria's soul and body shrank away from him […]1922, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, (please specify |book=1, 2, or 3)
Noun
coarsening (plural coarsenings)
- The process or the result of becoming coarse
Forms of coarsening
| plural | coarsenings |
|---|
Questions about coarsening
- What does coarsening mean?
- Coarsening means the process or the result of becoming coarse.
- What is coarsening the present participle and gerund of?
- Coarsening is the present participle and gerund of coarsen.
- What part of speech is coarsening?
- Coarsening is a noun.
- What is the plural of coarsening?
- The plural of coarsening is coarsenings.
Words near coarsening in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: coarsening (page history and authors); coarsen (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “coarsening.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/coarsening. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.