Adjective

(en adjective)

Coarsely, vulgarly, or lewdly amusing; referring to sexual matters in a rude or irreverent way.

* 1693 , :

[L]et no zealous Christian trust the rogue,—the filthy ribald rascal is a liar.

* 1875 , May 15, Anonymous, " :

But when he died the "Reform Democracy" instinctively returned to its vomit of ribald insult.

* 1888 , ", Can Such Things Be?'' (Pub. 1893):Originally published in the ''San Francisco Examiner'' on June 24, 1888, and later included in ''Can Such Things Be?'' and ''Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories .

[T]he curious crowd had collected in the street , with here and there a scoffer uttering his incredulity and courage with scornful remarks or ribald cries.

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.