barbarous
barbarous Lexical Profile
barbarous Game Scores & Validity
• adjective
Extremely brutal, cruel, or merciless; lacking human sympathy or restraint.
"The historian documented the barbarous treatment of prisoners in the medieval dungeon."
Uncivilized, primitive, and lacking culture, refinement, or sophistication.
"Early chroniclers often dismissed neighboring tribes as barbarous simply because their customs differed."
Coarse, unpolished, or offending against accepted standards of purity and style (of language, speech, or usage).
"The classical scholar complained that the document was written in a barbarous mixture of vernacular and late Latin."
Word Nuance & Usage
While 'barbarous' and 'barbaric' both denote extreme cruelty or lack of civilization, 'barbarous' more often emphasizes harsh, unrefined, or brutal treatment (and historically, impure language), whereas 'barbaric' frequently highlights wild, primitive, or unsophisticated aesthetics and behavior.
• Rhymes for barbarous
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
Borrowed from Latin barbarus, from Ancient Greek barbaros ('foreign, non-Greek, rude'), an onomatopoeic word originally imitating the perceived 'bar-bar' babble of incomprehensible foreign languages.