roughhouse
Americannoun
verb (used without object)
verb (used with object)
noun
verb
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of roughhouse
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.
See Examples For:
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
But he can’t play kickball or roughhouse with classmates at recess.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 4, 2019
The games were roughhouse affairs, said Joe Garcia, a family friend and former United States congressman.
From New York Times ● Jul. 21, 2017
Of course Betsie had always seemed older because she couldn’t run and roughhouse the way other children did.
From "The Hiding Place" by Corrie ten Boom
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 Kemp, Harry
“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
The class had developed such a reputation for roughhousing that some officers took to calling it “Fight Club,” Gage said.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 19, 2026
The couple already had two kids, Ben and Penny, and envisioned all of the roughhousing, road trips and happy mayhem that comes with four children.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 28, 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
The new season also fleshes out Tina, capitalizing on the nuanced tones Colón-Zayas uses to color a personality far more expansive than a hard exterior and roughhousing humor.
From Salon ● Jun. 22, 2023
It was summer, dusk, and Dad’s cousins were roughhousing the way they did after a harvest.
From "Educated" by Tara Westover
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
