Adjective

(er)

Somewhat fat, pudgy, overweight.

* 1824 , , Tales of a Traveller , Introduction:

Indeed, the poor man has grown ten times as nervous as ever, since he has discovered, on such good authority, who the stout gentleman was. . . . He has anxiously endeavored to call up a recollection of what he saw of that portly personage; and has ever since kept a curious eye on all gentlemen of more than ordinary dimensions.

* 1913 , , The Little Nugget , ch. 14:

His portly middle section, rising beyond like a small hill, heaved rhythmically.

* 2011 July 6, Nick Carbone, " Top 10 Worst Fictional Camp Counselors," Time (retrieved 8 May 2014):

In Heavyweights , Tony Perkis (Ben Stiller) is a fitness guru who installs himself as the über-buff leader of Camp Hope, with the goal of helping portly youngsters shed their saggy stomachs and thunder thighs.

*1590 , (Edmund Spenser), The Faerie Queene , III.2:

*:Portly his person was, and much increast

Through his Heroicke grace and honourable gest.

* 1728 , , "A Dialogue between Mad Mullinix and Timothy":

Be studious well to imitate

My portly motion, mien, and gait

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.