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Webster 1913 Edition

Noun.

The quality or state of being harsh.

O, she is
Ten times more gentle than her father’s crabbed,
And he's composed of

harshness

Shakespeare

Syn. – Acrimony; roughness; sternness; asperity; tartness. See

Noun.

Roughness to the touch; opposed to softness and smoothness.

Sourness; austereness; as the harshness of fruit.

Roughness to the ear; as the harshness of sound or of a voice, or of verse.

'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Roughness of temper; moroseness; crabbedness; peevishness.

Roughness in manner or words; severity; as the harshness of reproof.

harshness ‎(countable and uncountable, plural harshnesses)

The quality of being harsh.
- 1891, Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Part 6:
  And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.
- 1914, Louis Joseph Vance, Nobody, chapter II:
  She wakened in sharp panic, bewildered by the grotesquerie of some half-remembered dream in contrast with the harshness of inclement fact, drowsily realising that since she had fallen asleep it had come on to rain smartly out of a shrouded sky.