Obscenity vs Vulgarity: What’s the Difference?

The difference at a glance

Obscenity typically carries a legal or moral weight regarding offensive sexual or prohibited content. Vulgarity refers more generally to coarse or unrefined speech.

What does Obscenity mean?

noun · /əbˈsiː.nɪ.ti/

Material or language that violates accepted standards of decency — typically involving sexual content or deeply offensive speech. Obscenity is legally defined in many jurisdictions but resists stable definition: as a US Supreme Court justice famously said, 'I know it when I see it'.

Obscenity in a sentence

Miller v. California (1973) established the US legal standard for obscenity — but the definition remains contested.

What was obscene to one generation becomes unremarkable to the next — the taboo migrates but rarely disappears.

What does Vulgarity mean?

noun · /vʌlˈɡær.ɪ.ti/

The quality of being crude, coarse, or lacking refinement — particularly in language. Vulgarity is culturally relative and class-marked: what is vulgar in one social register is ordinary in another.

Vulgarity in a sentence

Aristocratic anxiety about vulgarity is really anxiety about contamination — the fear that exposure to common speech will compromise refinement.

Some artists court vulgarity deliberately — using the coarse and the crude as a critique of refinement's pretensions.

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