Word.ws English Dictionary

rough music

rough music noun: improvised noise created by banging saucepans, scrap metal etc., especially as a way for communities to express outrage or displeasure at someone's behaviour.

Noun

rough music (uncountable)

  1. (UK, historical) Improvised noise created by banging saucepans, scrap metal etc., especially as a way for communities to express outrage or displeasure at someone's behaviour.
    • Seventeen villagers of Lincolnshire have been fined for ‘rantanning’ […] the ‘rough music’ of kettle and pan, in which the rustic moralist conveys his sense of outraged propriety.1928 February 26, The Observer
    • Apart from making presentments in the Church courts, villagers had many informal ways of expressing their disapproval of the way a married couple comported themselves: by playing ‘rough music’ under their window, for example […]1971, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Folio Society, published 2012, page 507

Questions about rough music

What does rough music mean?
Rough music means improvised noise created by banging saucepans, scrap metal etc., especially as a way for communities to express outrage or displeasure at someone's behaviour.
What part of speech is rough music?
Rough music is a noun.

Words near rough music in the dictionary

  1. rough house
  2. rough it
  3. rough justice
  4. rough lemon
  5. rough lemons
  6. rough music
  7. rough number
  8. rough numbers
  9. rough out
  10. rough patch
  11. rough patches

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rough music (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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