1.
[syn: barbarous, brutal, cruel, fell, roughshod, savage, vicious]
2. primitive in customs and culture;
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Barbarous \Bar"ba*rous\, a. [L. barbarus, Gr. ba`rbaros,
strange, foreign; later, slavish, rude, ignorant; akin to L.
balbus stammering, Skr. barbara stammering, outlandish. Cf.
Brave, a.]
1. Being in the state of a barbarian; uncivilized; rude;
peopled with barbarians; as, a barbarous people; a
barbarous country.
[1913 Webster]
2. Foreign; adapted to a barbaric taste. [Obs.]
[1913 Webster]
Barbarous gold. --Dryden.
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3. Cruel; ferocious; inhuman; merciless.
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By their barbarous usage he died within a few days,
to the grief of all that knew him. --Clarendon.
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4. Contrary to the pure idioms of a language.
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A barbarous expression --G. Campbell.
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Syn: Uncivilized; unlettered; uncultivated; untutored;
ignorant; merciless; brutal. See Ferocious.
[1913 Webster]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
barbarous
adj 1: (of persons or their actions) able or disposed to inflict
pain or suffering; "a barbarous crime"; "brutal
beatings"; "cruel tortures"; "Stalin's roughshod
treatment of the kulaks"; "a savage slap"; "vicious
kicks" [syn: barbarous, brutal, cruel, fell,
roughshod, savage, vicious]
2: primitive in customs and culture
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0:
174 Moby Thesaurus words for "barbarous":
Doric, Draconian, Gothic, Neanderthal, Philistine, Tartarean,
alien, animal, anthropophagous, atrocious, backward, barbarian,
barbaric, beastly, benighted, bestial, bloodthirsty, bloody,
bloody-minded, bookless, brutal, brutalized, brute, brutish,
cacophonous, cannibalistic, careless, clumsy, coarse, cretinous,
crude, cruel, cruel-hearted, deceived, demoniac, demoniacal,
devilish, diabolic, doggerel, dysphemistic, erroneous, exotic,
exterior, external, extraneous, extraterrestrial, extrinsic,
faulty, fell, feral, ferine, ferocious, fiendish, fiendlike,
fierce, foreign, foreign-born, functionally illiterate, graceless,
grammarless, gross, harsh, heathen, hellish, hoodwinked, ignorant,
ill-bred, ill-educated, illiterate, impolite, imprecise, improper,
impure, in bad taste, inconcinnate, inconcinnous, incorrect,
indecorous, inelegant, infelicitous, infernal, inhuman, inhumane,
intrusive, kill-crazy, led astray, loose, low, lowbrow, malign,
malignant, merciless, misinformed, misinstructed, mistaught,
murderous, noncivilized, nonintellectual, outland, outlandish,
outside, pagan, philistine, pitiless, primitive, rough-and-ready,
rude, ruthless, sadistic, sanguinary, sanguineous, satanic, savage,
sharkish, slavering, slipshod, slovenly, solecistic, strange,
subhuman, tameless, tasteless, troglodytic, truculent, ulterior,
unbooked, unbookish, unbooklearned, unbriefed, unchristian,
uncivil, uncivilized, uncombed, unconscionable, uncourtly, uncouth,
uncultivated, uncultured, undignified, unearthly, unedified,
uneducated, unerudite, uneuphonious, unfelicitous, ungentle,
ungodly, ungraceful, ungrammatic, unguided, unholy, unhuman,
uninstructed, unintellectual, unkempt, unlearned, unlettered,
unlicked, unliterary, unpolished, unread, unrefined, unscholarly,
unschooled, unseemly, unstudious, untamed, untaught, untutored,
vicious, vulgar, wicked, wild, wolfish