Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The quality or state of being crude, in any sense of that word.
  • noun Indigestion.
  • noun That which is crude; something in a rough, unprepared, or undigested state: as, the crudities of an untrained imagination.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The condition of being crude; rawness.
  • noun That which is in a crude or undigested state; hence, superficial, undigested views, not reduced to order or form.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable The state of being crude.
  • noun A crude act or characteristic.
  • noun obsolete, medicine Indigestion; undigested food in the stomach; badly-concocted humours.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an impolite manner that is vulgar and lacking tact or refinement
  • noun a wild or unrefined state

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle French crudité, from Latin crūditās.

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Examples

  • Any civilized man recoils from crude behavior toward the symbols of any religion, but our legal system long ago decided that enduring crudity is better than giving the police a mandate to punish intrinsically religious offenses.

    Islamic Establishmentarianism 2007

  • But crudity is only the hallmark of those that have hijacked the conservative movement.

    Balkinization 2007

  • Any civilized man recoils from crude behavior toward the symbols of any religion, but our legal system long ago decided that enduring crudity is better than giving the police a mandate to punish intrinsically religious offenses.

    Stromata Blog: 2007

  • One is only looking for an order of magnitude answer, comparable in crudity to the back-of-the-envelope calculations of early cosmologists, but our biological friends tell us, without any apparent anxiety, that it just can't be done.

    Courting the Theists 2005

  • But beneath the crudity is a coming-of-age story that's strangely heartwarming.

    Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph 2011

  • Lincoln's "crudity" was democratic; Davis '"culture" was aristocratic -- nor is it to be denied that Davis had "aristocratic" views on government [1329].

    Great Britain and the American Civil War Ephraim Douglass Adams

  • The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of crudity or coarseness.

    Appreciations, with an Essay on Style Walter Pater 1866

  • Friedrich Engels, who fancied himself a champion of the workingman, regarded the Irish immigrant to Great Britain as having a "crudity" that "places him little above the savage."

    The Right Coast gheriot 2009

  • a flame fed overmuch with experience, with sophistication, grown cold under the ministrations of adroitness, and lighted now by the "crudity" of John's love-making.

    Lady Baltimore Owen Wister 1899

  • I’m all for disdaining conformity, but one needn’t be an insulting jackass in order to do it, nor throw this kind of crudity into a serious discussion.

    Proof by ostention 2008

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