Vulgar

How to spell vulgar

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce vulgar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vulgar mean?

1. adjectiveLacking refinement or good taste; coarse, crude, or indecent.
2. adjectiveOf or relating to the common people; ordinary or in general use, as in a vulgar fraction or the vulgar tongue.

Vulgar in a sentence

• The comedian's vulgar jokes embarrassed half the audience.

• Pupils learn to convert a vulgar fraction into a decimal.

• She found the gold furniture loud and vulgar.

• Medieval scholars wrote in Latin rather than the vulgar speech of the streets.

Where does vulgar come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin vulgaris, meaning 'belonging to the common people' or 'ordinary', which was built on the noun vulgus, the plain word for the general public or the crowd. In its earliest English use, picked up through Old French and Latin in the late 1300s and 1400s, it carried that neutral sense of 'common' or 'in everyday use', as in the vulgar tongue meaning the ordinary spoken language rather than scholarly Latin. Over the following centuries the sense slid downward: what was merely common came to be seen as unrefined, and by the 1600s vulgar increasingly meant coarse, crude, or lacking in taste. The same vulgus root survives in 'divulge', literally to make something known to the common crowd, and in the Vulgate, the Latin Bible prepared for ordinary readers. A useful spelling reminder is that the ending is -gar, echoing the Latin -garis, not the more familiar English -er.

How the word is built

• vulg- (from Latin vulgus: the common people)
• -ar (adjective suffix)