(of quantities) imprecise but fairly close to correct; "lasted approximately an hour"; "in just about a minute"; "he's about 30 years old"; "I've had about all I can stand"; "we meet about once a month"; "some forty people came"; "weighs around a hundred pounds"; "roughly $3,000"; "holds 3 gallons, more or less"; "20 or so people were at the party"
roughly
How to use roughly in a sentence. Example sentences and definitions for roughly.
Editorial note
I send roughly 300k mails through their servers in a matter of minutes.
Quick take
(of quantities) imprecise but fairly close to correct; "lasted approximately an hour"; "in just about a minute"; "he's about 30 years old"; "I've had about all I can stand"; "we meet about once a month"; "some forty people came"; "weighs around a hundred pounds"; "roughly $3,000"; "holds 3 gallons, more or less"; "20 or so people were at the party"
Meaning at a glance
The clearest senses and uses of roughly gathered in one view.
with roughness or violence (`rough' is an informal variant for `roughly'); "he was pushed roughly aside"; "they treated him rough"
with rough motion as over a rough surface; "ride rough"
Definitions
Core meanings and parts of speech for roughly.
adverb
(of quantities) imprecise but fairly close to correct; "lasted approximately an hour"; "in just about a minute"; "he's about 30 years old"; "I've had about all I can stand"; "we meet about once a month"; "some forty people came"; "weighs around a hundred pounds"; "roughly $3,000"; "holds 3 gallons, more or less"; "20 or so people were at the party"
See also: approximately, about, some, around
adverb
with roughness or violence (`rough' is an informal variant for `roughly'); "he was pushed roughly aside"; "they treated him rough"
See also: rough
adverb
with rough motion as over a rough surface; "ride rough"
See also: rough
Example sentences
I send roughly 300k mails through their servers in a matter of minutes.
More likely Bill knows how much e-mail he receives and roughly how much it grows per week/month.
I own my own servers and lease a full rack and I serve roughly 1 billion page impressions per month.
A million plays is roughly 62500 listener hours, which implies a content cost of $1250.
"By late Tuesday, some 70,000 calls had been placed to legislators and roughly 150,000 people had sent their representatives an email.
That's roughly how it's diagnosed in the diagnostic manual used by most psychiatrists: check off a list of symptoms, if you have enough, you're depressed.
I average around 130 megabits per second of transfer - constantly, peaking at 150mbps I'm transferring roughly 40 terabytes of data per month.
It got stuck at a roughly 1-in-a-million failure rate by a long time, until I figured out that it was crashing because of a stack overflow in the testing code, which would recursively sanity-check the produced DOM.
This seems to be a rare case where removing words adds information, rather than removing it: "The talks failed because of politics" means roughly what it says, while "The talks failed because politics" means roughly "The talks failed because of politics, which is the kind of thing that always happens when politics are involved".Any linguists care to comment whether there's a term for this kind of meaning compression?
"As to being bigger and stronger, perhaps we should look to the nation of Japan and the feats its military was able to achieve with men roughly the size of north american women"Maybe in this context you should look at Japanese men and women and find that in this case, as in pretty much every culture, men tend to be bigger and stronger then women and violence from one to the other is heavily weighted in the same direction.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.
How do you use roughly in a sentence?
I send roughly 300k mails through their servers in a matter of minutes.
What does roughly mean?
(of quantities) imprecise but fairly close to correct; "lasted approximately an hour"; "in just about a minute"; "he's about 30 years old"; "I've had about all I can stand"; "we meet about once a month"; "some forty people came"; "weighs around a hundred pounds"; "roughly $3,000"; "holds 3 gallons, more or less"; "20 or so people were at the party"
What part of speech is roughly?
roughly is commonly used as adverb.