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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
philistine
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ I wouldn't expect a philistine like you to understand my paintings.
▪ The American desire for material goods caused Europeans to dismiss them as philistines.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Birmingham is still declaimed as smoky, grimy, unpleasant and philistine.
▪ Certainly she was no philistine, but a graphic artist herself.
▪ She says she's a bit of a philistine and doesn't know much about rowing, but hopes to find out.
▪ The ball diamond was a sanctuary not to be broken into by philistines.
▪ When will there be an end to the philistine approach of the Government who apply a cornershop philosophy to the arts?
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Philistine

Philistine \Phi*lis"tine\, n. [L. Philistinus, Heb. Phlishth[=i], pl. Phlishth[=i]m.]

  1. A native or an inhabitant of ancient Philistia, a coast region of southern Palestine.

  2. A bailiff. [Cant, Eng.] [Obs.]
    --Swift.

  3. A person deficient in liberal culture and refinement; one without appreciation of the nobler aspirations and sentiments of humanity; one whose scope is limited to selfish and material interests. [Recent]
    --M. Arnold.

Philistine

Philistine \Phi*lis"tine\, a.

  1. Of or pertaining to the Philistines.

  2. Uncultured; commonplace.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Philistine

Old Testament people of coastal Palestine who made war on the Israelites, early 14c., from Old French Philistin, from Late Latin Philistinus, from Late Greek Philistinoi (plural), from Hebrew P'lishtim, "people of P'lesheth" ("Philistia"); compare Akkad. Palastu, Egyptian Palusata; the word probably is the people's name for itself.

philistine

"person deficient in liberal culture," 1827, originally in Carlyle, popularized by him and Matthew Arnold, from German Philister "enemy of God's word," literally "Philistine," inhabitants of a Biblical land, neighbors (and enemies) of Israel (see Philistine). Popularized in German student slang (supposedly first in Jena, late 17c.) as a contemptuous term for "townies," and hence, by extension, "any uncultured person." Philistine had been used in a humorous figurative sense of "the enemy" in English from c.1600.

Wiktionary
philistine

a. Hostile to or lacking in appreciation for art or culture, or having no understanding of them n. (alternative case form of Philistine English)

Usage examples of "philistine".

Though a queen as well as a Siren before she had married Saul, she was used to this poor little desert kingdom without fixed boundaries, and many times she had fled with her household before the advance of Philistines, Ammonites, or Moabites and lived for weeks on lizards and manna.

Those in the Word are the wars which the children of Israel waged with various nations, Amorites, Moabites, Philistines, Syrians, Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians.

The cosmopolitan Antiochenes returned the compliment, regarding Romans as mere duffers in depravity, philistines in art, but capable in war and government, and consequently to be feared, if not respected.

Philistines - Babylonish abominations - Mene, mene, tekel, upharisn - -.

Farmers were far from being the knuckle-cracking, clodhopping, parvenu philistines that the stage caricature of Turcaret suggested.

Had they been a family of philistines, they might be alive today and Eunice free in her mysterious dark freedom of sensation and instinct and blank absence of the printed word.

Israelite Yahweh, whom he invoked to protect his flocks, the Philistine Ashtoreth, whom he entreated to send him comely and compliant maidens, and the Midianite Sin, who, though a moon god, seemed to be good for luck in general.

Used to twit him with being a moneygrubber and with growing a corporation and being a Philistine generally.

At seventeen, he was forbidden by his oversolicitous father Jesse, familiarly known as the Ass of Bethlehem, to remain with his older brothers and fight the Philistines, though he had fought both the wolves and the lions which had harassed his flock.

Caligula fancied himself a connoisseur and was also sentimentally attached to Apelles, the Philistine tragic actor, who wrote many of the pieces in which he played.

Philistine who pooh-poohs the tales told of baby composers, and hints that they must have been a trial to their friends.

I hated the neighborhood, the pettiness of it, the closeted, cloistered, blinkered, racist, philistine, ghettoized narrowness of Queens and environs.

The apostles of light regard the rest of mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these self-constituted apostles are idle word-mongers, without any sympathy with humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions of life easier.

Or, handing him over to the police of the Philistines, you may put it, that a habit of assorting spices will render an earnest simplicity distasteful.

A considerable part of his letters was always occupied with lamentation over the cursed fate that bound him to the Philistines, though he took care to repeat that this was the result of his own choice, and that he blamed no one--unless it were his gross-minded step-father, who had driven him to such an alternative.