2. Hoodlum, roughneck: Young barbarians have defaced public buildings throughout the city.
3. Anti-intellectual, lowbrow, illiterate: The barbarian in the audience jeered the composer's new work.
The tribal dance was a spectacle of barbaric splendor.
2. Coarse, uncouth, crude, ill-mannered, vulgar, rude: Charley's behavior with the guests was barbaric and embarrassing.2. The use of words or forms felt to be incorrect or nonstandard; a specific word or form so used: Using the word "ain't" is considered a barbarism.
2. Coarse, crude, vulgar: The letter of complaint was written in barbarous English.
Shelby's friend, who was an English teacher, constantly commented about the barbarous language written by some of her pupils.
"Really, they are little barbarians whose previous years of schooling did nothing to tame their barbaric ways; they often use such barbarisms as 'Yo' instead of calling the person by name."
2. A rude, savage, alien, wild, uncivilized person.
3. An uncultured person, or someone who has no sympathy with literary culture.
4. Applied by nations, generally depreciatively, to foreigners; thus at various times and with various speakers or writers: non-Hellenic, non-Roman (most usual), non-Christian.
5. Uncultivated, uncultured, crude, unsophisticated, uncouth: "The artist accused the public of having barbarian tastes."
6. A foreigner, one whose language and customs differ from the speaker's.
From Greek barbaros, "non-Greek, foreign, barbarous," from an Indo-European imitative base barb, "to stammer, stutter; and unintelligible." The Greeks were quoted as saying that foreigners sounded as if they were saying, "Barbar, Barbar," which was, for the Greeks, unintelligible.
Barbarian, from Latin barbarus. It seems to have signified, at first, only a foreign or a foreigner; but, in time, it implied some degree of wildness or cruelty.