Adjective

(er)

Resembling dirt or soil (i.e. earth).

The earthy smell of fresh turned loam told me the farmer had started plowing this morning, the definitive sign of spring for me.

Down to earth, un-artificed, natural.

She was an earthy soul, the salt of the earth as they say of such rural folk, untarnished by false civilization.

Like or resembling the earth or of the earth.

Covered with earth (mud, dirt).

* 1922 , (Margery Williams), (The Velveteen Rabbit)

He was wet through with the dew and quite earthy from diving into the burrows the Boy had made for him in the flower bed, and Nana grumbled as she rubbed him off with a corner of her apron.

Adjective

(en-adj)

(US, slang) Disgusting.

Coarse, rude, vulgar, obscene, or impure.

* 1874 : Dodsley et al., A Select Collection of Old English Plays

But 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.

* , chapter=12

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=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.}}

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 .

Great, serious, flagrant, or shameful.

The whole amount; entire; total before any deductions.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Boundary problems , passage=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.}}

Not sensitive in perception or feeling; dull; witless.

* Milton

Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear.