Definify.com

Webster 1913 Edition


Brutish

Bru′tish

,
Adj.
Pertaining to, or resembling, a brute or brutes; of a cruel, gross, and stupid nature; coarse; unfeeling; unintelligent.
O, let all provocation
Take every
brutish
shape it can devise.
Leigh Hunt.
Man may . . . render himself
brutish
, but it is in vain that he would seek to take the rank and density of the brute.
I. Taylor.
Syn. – Insensible; stupid; unfeeling; savage; cruel; brutal; barbarous; inhuman; ferocious; gross; carnal; sensual; bestial.
Bru′tish-ly
,
adv.
Bru′tish-ness
,
Noun.

Webster 1828 Edition


Brutish

BRU'TISH

,
Adj.
Like a brute or beast; as a brutish form.
1.
Insensible; stupid; as brutish men.
2.
Unfeeling; savage; ferocious; brutal.
3.
Gross; carnal; bestial.
4.
Ignorant; uncivilized; untaught.

Definition 2024


brutish

brutish

English

Adjective

brutish (comparative more brutish, superlative most brutish)

  1. Of, or in the manner of a brute
  2. Bestial; lacking human sensibility

Quotations

  • 1651, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
    No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
  • 1843, Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, book 3, ch. IX, Working Aristocracy
    The haggard despair of Cotton-factory, Coal-mine operatives, Chandos Farm-labourers, in these days, is painful to behold; but not so painful, hideous to the inner sense, as the brutish god-forgetting Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, and Life-theory, which we hear jangled on all hands of us […]
  • 2013 June 1, “Towards the end of poverty”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 11:
    But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 (the average of the 15 poorest countries’ own poverty lines, measured in 2005 dollars and adjusted for differences in purchasing power): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Translations