Word.ws English Dictionary

roughwork

roughwork verb: to work over coarsely, without regard to nicety or smoothness.

Verb

roughwork (third-person singular simple present roughworks, present participle roughworking, simple past and past participle roughworked)

  1. (dated, rare, transitive) To work over coarsely, without regard to nicety or smoothness.
    • we will not suppose that the Grooves are of an equal depth with the Rough-working of the Gouge1677–1683, Joseph Moxon, “(please specify the page)”, in Mechanick Exercises, or The Doctrine of Handy-Works, […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: […] Joseph Moxon, published...

Forms of roughwork

third-person singular presentroughworks
present participleroughworking
past participleroughworked
pastroughworked

Origin of roughwork

From rough + work.

Questions about roughwork

What does roughwork mean?
Roughwork means to work over coarsely, without regard to nicety or smoothness.
What part of speech is roughwork?
Roughwork is a verb.
What is the past tense of roughwork?
The past tense of roughwork is roughworked.

Words near roughwork in the dictionary

  1. Roughton
  2. Roughtons
  3. Roughts
  4. roughwing
  5. roughwings
  6. roughwork
  7. roughworked
  8. roughworking
  9. roughworks
  10. roughy
  11. rouging

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: roughwork (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: “roughwork.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/roughwork. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.