barbarous

barbarous
    adj 1: (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: {barbarous}, {brutal}, {cruel}, {fell},
           {roughshod}, {savage}, {vicious}]
    2: primitive in customs and culture
    

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.
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   2. Foreign; adapted to a barbaric taste. [Obs.]
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            Barbarous gold.                       --Dryden.
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   3. Cruel; ferocious; inhuman; merciless.
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            By their barbarous usage he died within a few days,
            to the grief of all that knew him.    --Clarendon.
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   4. Contrary to the pure idioms of a language.
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            A barbarous expression                --G. Campbell.
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   Syn: Uncivilized; unlettered; uncultivated; untutored;
        ignorant; merciless; brutal. See {Ferocious}.
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174 Moby Thesaurus words for "barbarous":
      Doric, Draconian, Gothic, Neanderthal, Philistine, Tartarean,
      alien, animal, anthropophagous, atrocious, backward, barbarian,
      barbaric, beastly, benighted, bestial, bloodthirsty, bloody,
      bloody-minded, bookless, brutal, brutalized, brute, brutish,
      cacophonous, cannibalistic, careless, clumsy, coarse, cretinous,
      crude, cruel, cruel-hearted, deceived, demoniac, demoniacal,
      devilish, diabolic, doggerel, dysphemistic, erroneous, exotic,
      exterior, external, extraneous, extraterrestrial, extrinsic,
      faulty, fell, feral, ferine, ferocious, fiendish, fiendlike,
      fierce, foreign, foreign-born, functionally illiterate, graceless,
      grammarless, gross, harsh, heathen, hellish, hoodwinked, ignorant,
      ill-bred, ill-educated, illiterate, impolite, imprecise, improper,
      impure, in bad taste, inconcinnate, inconcinnous, incorrect,
      indecorous, inelegant, infelicitous, infernal, inhuman, inhumane,
      intrusive, kill-crazy, led astray, loose, low, lowbrow, malign,
      malignant, merciless, misinformed, misinstructed, mistaught,
      murderous, noncivilized, nonintellectual, outland, outlandish,
      outside, pagan, philistine, pitiless, primitive, rough-and-ready,
      rude, ruthless, sadistic, sanguinary, sanguineous, satanic, savage,
      sharkish, slavering, slipshod, slovenly, solecistic, strange,
      subhuman, tameless, tasteless, troglodytic, truculent, ulterior,
      unbooked, unbookish, unbooklearned, unbriefed, unchristian,
      uncivil, uncivilized, uncombed, unconscionable, uncourtly, uncouth,
      uncultivated, uncultured, undignified, unearthly, unedified,
      uneducated, unerudite, uneuphonious, unfelicitous, ungentle,
      ungodly, ungraceful, ungrammatic, unguided, unholy, unhuman,
      uninstructed, unintellectual, unkempt, unlearned, unlettered,
      unlicked, unliterary, unpolished, unread, unrefined, unscholarly,
      unschooled, unseemly, unstudious, untamed, untaught, untutored,
      vicious, vulgar, wicked, wild, wolfish