• Gross

    Pronunciation

    • Rhymes: -əʊs

    Origin

    From Middle English gross ("whole, entire", also "flagrant, monstrous"), from Old French gros ("big, thick, large, stour"), from Late Latin grossus ("thick in diameter, coarse"), and Medieval Latin grossus ("great, big"), from Old High German grōz ("big, thick, coarse"), from Proto-Germanic *grautaz ("large, great, thick, coarse grained, unrefined"), from Proto-Indo-European *ghrewə- ("to fell, put down, fall in"). Cognate with French grossier ("gross"). See also French dialectal grôt, groût (Berry, "large"), and grô (Burgundy, "large"), Dutch groot ("big, large"), German groß ("large"), English great. More at great.

    Full definition of gross

    Adjective

    gross

    1. (US, slang) Disgusting.
    2. Coarse, rude, vulgar, obscene, or impure.
      • 1874: Dodsley et al., A Select Collection of Old English PlaysBut man to know God is a difficulty, except by a mean he himself inure, which is to know God’s creatures that be: at first them that be of the grossest nature, and then ... them that be more pure.
      • 1918, W. B. Maxwell, The Mirror and the Lamp Chapter 12, All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill. It was ugly, gross. Never before had he felt such repulsion when the vicar displayed his characteristic bluntness or coarseness of speech. In the present connexion—or rather as a transition from the subject that started their conversation—such talk had been distressingly out of place.
    3. Great, large, bulky, or fat.
      • 2013, Hilary Mantel, ‘Royal Bodies’, London Review of Books, 35.IV:He collected a number of injuries that stopped him jousting, and then in middle age became stout, eventually gross.
    4. Great, serious, flagrant, or shameful.
      a gross mistake;  gross injustice;  gross negligence
    5. The whole amount; entire; total before any deductions.
      • 2013-08-03, Boundary problems, Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.
    6. w
    7. Not sensitive in perception or feeling; dull; witless.
      • MiltonTell her of things that no gross ear can hear.

    Synonyms

    Antonyms

    • fine
    • (total before any deductions) net

    Related terms

    Noun

    gross

    (plural gross or grosses)
    1. Twelve dozen = 144.
    2. The total nominal earnings or amount, before taxes, expenses, exceptions or similar are deducted. That which remains after all deductions is called net.
    3. The bulk, the mass, the masses.

    Verb

    1. To earn money, not including expenses.The movie grossed three million on the first weekend.

    Related terms

    Derived terms

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