Word.ws English Dictionary

slept rough

slept rough is the simple past and past participle of sleep rough.

Meaning of sleep rough

Verb

sleep rough (third-person singular simple present sleeps rough, present participle sleeping rough, simple past and past participle slept rough)

  1. (idiomatic) Of a homeless person, to sleep outdoors, particularly as opposed to sleeping in a shelter or similar.
    • I will warrant they prove such roaring boys as I knew when I served under Lumford and Goring, [...] —sleeping rough on the trenches, and dying stubbornly in their boats. Ah! those merry days are gone.1826, [Walter Scott], chapter IV, in Woodstock; Or, The Cavalier. […], volume II, Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and...

Questions about slept rough

What is slept rough the simple past and past participle of?
Slept rough is the simple past and past participle of sleep rough.

Words near slept rough in the dictionary

  1. slept off
  2. slept on
  3. slept one off
  4. slept out
  5. slept over
  6. slept rough
  7. slept together
  8. slept with
  9. slept with one eye open
  10. slept with one's fathers
  11. slept with the fishes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: slept rough (page history and authors); sleep rough (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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