roughage

English

WOTD – 10 February 2022

Etymology

Corn silage used as roughage (sense 2) or cattle fodder.
A selection of food with a high roughage (sense 3) or dietary fibre content.

From rough (“not smooth; crude, unrefined”) +‎ -age (suffix forming nouns with the sense of appurtenance or collection).[1]

Pronunciation

Noun

roughage (countable and uncountable, plural roughages)

  1. Originally (archaic), garbage, rubbish, or waste; later (agriculture) the portions of a crop which are discarded, such as husks, stalks, etc.; also, agricultural waste such as weeds.
    Antonym: nonroughage
  2. (agriculture) Coarse or rough plant material such as hay and silage used as animal fodder.
    Synonym: (US) roughness
  3. (nutrition) Substances, generally of plant origin, consisting mostly of complex carbohydrates which are undigested when eaten by humans, and which therefore help the passage of food and waste through the alimentary tract; dietary fibre.
    Antonym: nonroughage
    • 1995, Paul Vautin, Turn It Up!, Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, page 188:
      I keep telling her not to eat all that roughage for brekky; prunes, bran, and baked beans.

Alternative forms

Derived terms

Descendants

  • → Hindi: रफ़ेज (rafej)
  • → Urdu: رفیج (rafej)

Translations

References

  1. ^ “roughage, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2020; “roughage, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further reading

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