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roughhouse

[ruhf-haus, ruhf-haus, -hauz] / ˈrʌfˌhaʊs, ˈrʌfˌhaʊs, -ˌhaʊz /
NOUN
roughness
Synonyms


Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

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Alex Wolff stars as Tom, a sophomore at a Southern liberal arts school shirking his studies to romp and roughhouse with his fraternity brothers in the fictional Kappa Nu Alpha.

From New York Times ● Jun. 7, 2023

Mauro Bellugi pestered Brooking in the roughhouse style.

From The Guardian ● Jul. 11, 2021

Shavell said her father taught her how to play softball, loved to roughhouse with her and her brother, could fix anything around the house, and was the person that neighbors called if they needed anything.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 5, 2020

He told his uncle that he didn’t talk when he wasn’t supposed to, didn’t roughhouse, that he helped pick up things from the floor and helped the teacher pass out papers.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 4, 2019

Finally, she’d found a playmate she could roughhouse with.

From "The Son of Neptune" by Rick Riordan

My elementary school daughter won't wear "pretty" clothes, roughhouses with her dad, likes baby animals, befriends mostly girls and identifies as a girl.

From New York Times ● Nov. 24, 2017

Some days at home he wears dresses, paints his fingernails and plays with dolls; other days, he roughhouses, rams his toys together or pretends to be Spider-Man.

From New York Times ● Aug. 12, 2012

He lives in a sunny, 14-room house with an adjoining tennis court and swimming pool where he roughhouses in off hours with four shiny, beaming sons.

From Time Magazine Archive

We held frequent "roughhouses" there, the younger of us ... to the annoyance of Speedwell.

From Tramping on Life An Autobiographical Narrative by Harry Kemp

“That day, I was roughhoused and treated unfairly for no reason,” Price testified Monday.

From Seattle Times ● Jan. 27, 2022

Morsell’s parents would hear the thuds from the boys crashing into the wall as they roughhoused and tried to dunk.

From Washington Post ● Mar. 18, 2021

That sense of seductive inevitability, which was ever-present in the 1999 Broadway revival with Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie, is roughhoused out of Ellis’ production.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 14, 2019

He joshed and roughhoused with the boys, and seemed to settle immediately into companionship with them in a way that belied the remote gaze he had trained on everyone during the first rehearsal and dinner.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 20, 2010

As their camouflaged troop carriers hummed and tanks growled, they roughhoused, wrestling and knocking one another about.

From "Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow" by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

As the grazing heifers lifted their horns, their playful roughhousing seemed like a display of holiday cheer.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 24, 2023

He recalls research in the 1970s on roughhousing in cockroaches, for example, that would immediately be considered an example of play if puppies were doing it.

From Science Magazine ● Aug. 15, 2023

Besides climbing, the main actions of the dancers remained in the zone of perpetual entanglement: roughhousing, hugging.

From New York Times ● Jun. 19, 2023

Some of them are like Serra’s Kaylah Holmes, who grew up roughhousing with her brothers and has been yearning to play football since she was 5 years old.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 29, 2023

The rooms, piled above each other like roughhousing siblings, faced a trash heap.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee


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