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usually uncountable, plural proses
Language, particularly written language, not intended as poetry. quotations examples
...Or if Sion HillDelight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow’dFaft by the Oracle of God; I thenceInvoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,That with no middle flight intends to soarAbove th’ Ionian Mounts while it pursuesThings unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime...
1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost (1st ed)
Language which evinces little imagination or animation; dull and commonplace discourse. quotations examples
...the vehicle is plodding prose, but the effect is none the less poignant. And in regard to this I may say that in a hundred places in Trollope the extremity of pathos is reached by the homeliest means.
1888, Henry James, Partial Portraits, Macmillan
(Roman Catholicism) A hymn with no regular meter, sometimes introduced into the Mass. quotations examples
Proses are parts of the Office of the Mass which are sung just before the Gospel, upon great Festivals. The French also call those Rhythmical Hymns Proses, which are sung in their Offices in the Church of Rome, in which Rhime only, and not Quantity of Syllables, is observed.
1699, A new ecclesiastical history
third-person singular simple present proses, present participle prosing, simple past and past participle prosed
To write or repeat in a dull, tedious, or prosy way. quotations examples
Pray, do not prose, good Ethelbert, but speak;What is your purpose?
1819, John Keats, Otho the Great, act I, scene II, verses 189-190
Already he felt himself near to being a celebrity. He had astonished Eton. That was a good beginning. Papa might prose, knowing, of course, nothing of the poetry of caricature, of the wild joys and the laurels that crown the whimsical. So while Mr. Lane hunted adjectives, and ran sad-sounding and damnatory substantives to earth, Eustace hugged himself, and secretly chuckled over his pilgrim's progress towards the pages of Vanity Fair.
1896, Robert Smythe Hichens, The Folly of Eustace