In the 16th century, Turkish women could divorce their husbands if the man failed to keep his family’s pot filled with coffee.
HARSHNESS
severity, severeness, harshness, rigor, rigour, rigorousness, rigourousness, inclemency, hardness, stiffness
(noun) excessive sternness; “severity of character”; “the harshness of his punishment was inhuman”; “the rigors of boot camp”
cruelty, cruelness, harshness
(noun) the quality of being cruel and causing tension or annoyance
harshness, abrasiveness, scratchiness
(noun) the roughness of a substance that causes abrasions
harshness, roughness
(noun) the quality of being harsh or rough or grating to the senses
Source: WordNet® 3.1
Etymology
Noun
harshness (countable and uncountable, plural harshnesses)
The quality of being harsh.
She wakened in sharp panic, bewildered by the grotesquerie of some half-remembered dream in contrast with the harshness of inclement fact, drowsily realising that since she had fallen asleep it had come on to rain smartly out of a shrouded sky.
Source: Wiktionary
Harsh"ness, n.
Definition: The quality or state of being harsh. O, she is Ten times more gentle than her father 's crabbed, And he's composed of harshness. Shak. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense, The sound must seem an echo to the sense. Pope.
Syn.
– Acrimony; roughness; sternness; asperity; tartness. See Acrimony.
Source: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1913 Edition
Recent Word Finds
Word of the Day
16 June 2024
CONNECTION
(noun) a relation between things or events (as in the case of one causing the other or sharing features with it); “there was a connection between eating that pickle and having that nightmare”
Coffee Trivia
