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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
barbarous
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ He saw it now as his mission to establish similar normality in a barbarous land.
▪ In many cases, perhaps, it simply meant that clergy and people were equally barbarous.
▪ It might well be barbarous on either side of the jeweled door.
▪ Of course we live in less barbarous times.
▪ Still less was he interested in what he considered the barbarous traditions of the Anglo-Saxon Church which he found on his arrival.
▪ They will also say that the Faroese method of killing whales is a barbarous way of treating an intelligent, warm-blooded mammal.
▪ When the Persian ambassadors arrived at Athens, demanding tribute in their barbarous tongue, my heart filled with fury.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Barbarous

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.

  2. Foreign; adapted to a barbaric taste. [Obs.]

    Barbarous gold.
    --Dryden.

  3. Cruel; ferocious; inhuman; merciless.

    By their barbarous usage he died within a few days, to the grief of all that knew him.
    --Clarendon.

  4. Contrary to the pure idioms of a language.

    A barbarous expression
    --G. Campbell.

    Syn: Uncivilized; unlettered; uncultivated; untutored; ignorant; merciless; brutal. See Ferocious.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
barbarous

c.1400, "uncivilized, uncultured, ignorant," from Latin barbarus, from Greek barbaros (see barbarian). Meaning "not Greek or Latin" (of words or language) is from c.1500; that of "savagely cruel" is from 1580s.

Wiktionary
barbarous

a. 1 (context said of language English) Not classical or pure. 2 uncivilized, uncultured 3 Like a barbarian, especially in sound; noisy, dissonant. alt. 1 (context said of language English) Not classical or pure. 2 uncivilized, uncultured 3 Like a barbarian, especially in sound; noisy, dissonant.

WordNet
barbarous
  1. adj. (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: brutal, cruel, fell, roughshod, savage, vicious]

  2. primitive in customs and culture

Usage examples of "barbarous".

With a redder, more abysmal gleam in his deep dark eyes he told of men and women flayed alive, mutilated and dismembered, of captives howling under tortures so ghastly that even the barbarous Cimmerian grunted.

An ambiguous passage of Theophanes persuaded the annalist of the church that death was the immediate consequence of this barbarous execution.

I would fain tickle his long ears with ribald rhyme, and hearken to the barbarous braying forth of his asinine reflections!

About the same time, one John Stacey, an ecclesiastic, much connected with the duke as well as with Burdet, was exposed to a like iniquitous and barbarous prosecution.

Once there is established the differential between the pure, civilized European and the corrupt, barbarous Other, there is possible not only a civilizing process from disease to health, but also ineluctably the reverse process, from health to disease.

But though the king, by detaining James in the English court, had shown himself somewhat deficient in generosity, he made ample amends by giving that prince an excellent education, which afterwards qualified him, when he mounted the throne, to reform in some measure the rude and barbarous manners of his native country.

Gradus is discursively seduced in a way that makes the seeming distinction between him and Kinbote, as well as that between the baroque and the simple, the cultured and the barbarous, the homosexual and the heterosexual, and the roughly masculine and the decadently effeminized, appear to be nothing more than the product of an obsessive and pedantic imagination which insists on impressing its own absurdly reductive schema on a disorderly world that consistently eludes it.

From this perspective a classically ordered universe can be reimagined in which the European, the effeminized, the homosexual, the refined, and the aristocratic are systematically opposed to the American, the virile, the simplistic, and the barbarous.

I tell you, I went up those steps faster than a scalded faggot, propelled by a barbarous diuretic terror on behalf of my exposed rear end.

But the priests in the Heptarchy, after the first missionaries, were wholly Saxons, and almost as ignorant and Barbarous as the laity.

She also expressed her anger at making her appear before him in a state of semi-nudity, and swore she would never forgive his barbarous and despotic conduct.

McGuigan, a tall, thin, hipless Australian with a barbarous accent, stepped forward eagerly to meet the man with whom he had talked in both Gemini and Apollo.

If they only knew how infinitely barbarous they seem to us in their naive contempt of our barbarism, and in what we regard as their infantine concern with things as they are.

Corenice and Jaun, the Basque, although so much purer that they smiled politely at his barbarous accent.

RAVENSBUNDMEN: the inhabitants of Ravensbund, generally loathed by the Acharites as barbarous and cruel.