Words similar to gruff

Example sentences for: gruff

How can you use “gruff” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:

The hockey ethos is to be elaborately casual and gruff about competitive achievement: Outstanding performance gets you a little slap on the helmet, a good-natured insult.
Ten interpreters stepped from behind the throne.The English one at last explained the Holy FatherHad urged us all to wear seatbelts while driving.My heart sank at its plain good sense, as hymnsEchoed and golden canopies enfolded the pope,How like home it seemed, with my own fatherA preoccupied patriarch of practicalityWhen what was wanted veered wildly betweenThe gruff headmaster and the drunken playwright.Instead, I got the distant advertising salesman,The suburban dad of what turned out to be my dreams ...
The gruff, bluff warriors’ taste for art — calligraphy, landscape painting, the tea ceremony, music, dance, and theater — coincided with a renewed interest in things Chinese, above all the teachings of Zen Buddhism.
Writer-director Joel Schumacher's ( Batman Forever ) tale of a gruff, homophobic ex-cop (Robert De Niro) who ends up bonding with his drag queen neighbor (Philip Seymour Hoffman) exasperates the critics.
One virtue of having chosen these particular characters--a gruff, empathetic nurse instead of a polished, pro-choice lobbyist; a thoughtful, vaguely leftish Catholic as opposed to a fire-breathing evangelic--is that we can live with them for 500 pages or so.