[vuhl-ger] 
| 1. | characterized by ignorance of or lack of good breeding or taste: vulgar ostentation. |
| 2. | indecent; obscene; lewd: a vulgar work; a vulgar gesture. |
| 3. | crude; coarse; unrefined: a vulgar peasant. |
| 4. | of, pertaining to, or constituting the ordinary people in a society: the vulgar masses. |
| 5. | current; popular; common: a vulgar success; vulgar beliefs. |
| 6. | spoken by, or being in the language spoken by, the people generally; vernacular: vulgar tongue. |
| 7. | lacking in distinction, aesthetic value, or charm; banal; ordinary: a vulgar painting. |
| 8. | Archaic. the common people. |
| 9. | Obsolete. the vernacular. |
| vul·gar (vŭl'gər) adj.
[Middle English, from Latin vulgāris, from vulgus, the common people.] vul'gar·ly adv., vul'gar·ness n. Word History: The word vulgar now brings to mind off-color jokes and offensive epithets, but it once had more neutral meanings. Vulgar is an example of pejoration, the process by which a word develops negative meanings over time. The ancestor of vulgar, the Latin word vulgāris (from vulgus, "the common people"), meant "of or belonging to the common people, everyday," as well as "belonging to or associated with the lower orders." Vulgāris also meant "ordinary," "common (of vocabulary, for example)," and "shared by all." An extension of this meaning was "sexually promiscuous," a sense that could have led to the English sense of "indecent." Our word, first recorded in a work composed in 1391, entered English during the Middle English period, and in Middle English and later English we find not only the senses of the Latin word mentioned above but also related senses. What is common may be seen as debased, and in the 17th century we begin to find instances of vulgar that make explicit what had been implicit. Vulgar then came to mean "deficient in taste, delicacy, or refinement." From such uses vulgar has continued to go downhill, and at present "crudely indecent" is among the commonest senses of the word. |
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