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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
brutalize
verb
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Many of the prisoners were brutalized by soldiers.
▪ Young men are often brutalized by their experiences in jail.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ After 75 days of being brutalized and sexually assaulted by other inmates and ignored by the prison guards, Rodney hanged himself.
▪ He had been brutalized in prison and become cynical.
▪ Literacy can be gained by brutalizing the imagination.
▪ Not one of the nurses apologized or indicated in any way that they had been brutalizing the patient.
▪ Racial violence began again when law enforcement officers brutalized peaceful civil rights protestors.
▪ Slavery brutalized its victims, but it also corrupted its masters.
▪ The rumor quickly spread among the black soldiers that other blacks were being brutalized by the police.
▪ There is something about coal mining that seems to brutalize a place.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Brutalize

Brutalize \Bru"tal*ize\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Brutalized; p. pr. & vb. n. Brutalizing.] [Cf. F. brutaliser.] To make brutal; beasty; unfeeling; or inhuman.

Brutalize

Brutalize \Bru"tal*ize\, v. i. To become brutal, inhuman, barbarous, or coarse and beasty.

He mixed . . . with his countrymen, brutalized with them in their habits and manners.
--Addison.

Wiktionary
brutalize

vb. (alternative spelling of brutalise English)

WordNet
brutalize
  1. v. treat brutally [syn: brutalise]

  2. make brutal, unfeeling, or inhuman; "Life in the camps had brutalized him" [syn: brutalise, animalize, animalise]

  3. become brutal or insensitive and unfeeling [syn: brutalise, animalize, animalise]

Usage examples of "brutalize".

Her murdered son was the most famous example, but little Manion had not been the first child brutalized by machines, nor had he been the last.

The Priests of Brahma, professing a dark and bloody creed, brutalized by Superstition, united together against Buddhism, and with the aid of Despotism, exterminated its followers.

And these, his comrades, these dirty-faced roughnecks, these dangerous brutalized amoral little creatures with pinched faces and ragged trousers, spattered with snot and rheum and urban dirt, girls in stained shifts and boys with jackets too big, grabbed cobblestones from the earth and pelted me where I lay in the darkness of a decaying threshold.

The Priests of Brahma, professing a dark and bloody creed, brutalized by Superstition, united together against Buddhism, and with the aid of Despotism, exterminated its followers.

Though, plainly, she had been horrendously brutalized and, the medical examiner would conclude, most probably raped, an overnight thunderstorm and the rushing creek had conspired to frustrate investigators in their search for clues.

She considered that the Majorcans had been brutalized and fanaticized, thanks to their influence.

Wave after wave of the swarthy, fur-clad, stinking riders on their shaggy, big-headed ponies had crisscrossed the lands, each horde trailed by a heterogeneous collection of carts, waggons, wains, pack beasts, and coffles of chained, brutalized, and terrified slaves, folk of all stations and both sexes, for the primitive Kalmyks did not recognize the practice of ransoming war captives.

Of all the places to scrounge for drug-fighting money, pilfer it from those most brutalized by crack: the young, the poor and minorities.

To say that war brutalized men was like saying that famine made people hungry.

The poor, worn-down, brutalized creatures, at first, could scarce comprehend this.

Some were those of brutalized animals, the ones who had stopped thinking because thought brought nothing that was good.

It's a carryover custom from two centuries ago, from the pre-Horseclans Ehleen army, in which common spearmen were all peasantsto all intents and purpose, brutish and brutalized military slaves.

The women expected much the same, but while they were horribly brutalized, tied up, made to do most anything imaginable, and ultimately repeatedly raped, they were by Asterial's expressed command not mutilated or killed.

Certainly a lot of these bootlick the SS and brutalize other prisoners to save their own skins.

He attributes this attitude to the fact of seeing their mothers brutalized, spiritually and physically, by husbands who treated them as objects, rather than as living beings.