Adjacent Words

barbarism definitions

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WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

n
1: a brutal barbarous savage act [syn: brutality, barbarity, barbarism, savagery]

Merriam Webster's

noun Date: 15th century 1. a. a barbarian or barbarous social or intellectual condition ; backwardness b. the practice or display of barbarian acts, attitudes, or ideas 2. an idea, act, or expression that in form or use offends against contemporary standards of good taste or acceptability

Oxford Reference Dictionary

n. 1 a the absence of culture and civilized standards; ignorance and rudeness. b an example of this. 2 a word or expression not considered correct; a solecism. 3 anything considered to be in bad taste. Etymology: F barbarisme f. L barbarismus f. Gk barbarismos f. barbarizo speak like a foreigner f. barbaros foreign

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Barbarism Bar"ba*rism, n. [L. barbarismus, Gr. ?; cf. F. barbarisme.] 1. An uncivilized state or condition; rudeness of manners; ignorance of arts, learning, and literature; barbarousness. --Prescott. 2. A barbarous, cruel, or brutal action; an outrage. A heinous barbarism . . . against the honor of marriage. --Milton. 3. An offense against purity of style or language; any form of speech contrary to the pure idioms of a particular language. See Solecism. The Greeks were the first that branded a foreign term in any of their writers with the odious name of barbarism. --G. Campbell.

Collin's Cobuild Dictionary

If you refer to someone's behaviour as barbarism, you strongly disapprove of it because you think that it is extremely cruel or uncivilized. We do not ask for the death penalty: barbarism must not be met with barbarism. [disapproval]

Soule's Dictionary of English Synonyms

n. 1. Savagism, savage state, savagery, barbarous state, uncivilized condition. 2. Rudeness, roughness, brutality, savageness, harshness, destructiveness, vandalism. 3. Impurity (of diction), impropriety, unauthorized expression. 4. Atrocity, outrage, act of cruelty or barbarity, brutality.

Moby Thesaurus

Gothicism, Irish bull, Neanderthalism, age of ignorance, animality, antiphrasis, bad taste, barbarity, barbarousness, benightedness, benightment, bestiality, bombasticness, brutality, brutishness, cacology, cacophony, clumsiness, coarseness, colloquialism, corruption, crudeness, cumbrousness, dark, dark age, darkness, dysphemism, error, foreignism, gracelessness, grossness, harshness, heathenism, heaviness, ill breeding, ill-balanced sentences, impoliteness, impropriety, impurity, incivility, inconcinnity, incorrectness, indecorousness, inelegance, inelegancy, infelicity, lack of finish, lack of polish, lapse, leadenness, localism, malaprop, malapropism, misconstruction, missaying, misusage, misuse, neologism, paganism, philistinism, pompousness, ponderousness, poor diction, roughness, rudeness, savagery, savagism, sesquipedalianism, sesquipedality, shibboleth, slang, slip, slipshod construction, solecism, spoonerism, stiltedness, taboo word, tastelessness, troglodytism, turgidity, uncivilizedness, uncouthness, uncultivatedness, uncultivation, unculturedness, unenlightenment, uneuphoniousness, ungracefulness, ungrammaticism, unrefinement, unseemliness, unwieldiness, vernacularism, vulgarism, vulgarity, wildness