barbarism

American  

[bahr-buh-riz-uhm] / ˈbɑr bəˌrɪz əm /

noun

1. a barbarous or uncivilized state or condition.

2. a barbarous act; something belonging to or befitting a barbarous condition.

3. the use in a language of forms or constructions felt by some to be undesirably alien to the established standards of the language.

4. such a form or construction.

   Some people consider “complected” as a barbarism.

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barbarism British  

/ ˈbɑːbəˌrɪzəm /

noun

1. a brutal, coarse, or ignorant act

2. the condition of being backward, coarse, or ignorant

3. a substandard or erroneously constructed or derived word or expression; solecism

4. any act or object that offends against accepted taste

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Other Word Forms

• hyperbarbarism noun

Etymology

Origin of barbarism

1570–80; < Latin barbarismus < Greek barbarismós foreign way of speaking. See barbarous, -ism

Example Sentences

The Human Rights Commission of the Rio state legislature will demand "explanations" of how the favela was turned into a "theater of war and barbarism," commission head Dani Monteiro told AFP on Tuesday.

From Barron's

Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism.

From Salon

This came despite the fact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly condemned the aerial bombardment of civilian infrastructure before the U.S. entry into the war as “inhuman barbarism.”

From Salon

But these veterans had actually done that and won, and remain now as some of the last representatives of a generation that fought Nazism and all of the intolerance and barbarism that represented.

From BBC

But if “Occupied City” is an account of barbarism in a country that saw about 75% of its Jewish population murdered during the Holocaust, it is also, stirringly, a chronicle of mass resistance.

From Los Angeles Times

Related Words

• atrocity
• barbarity
• brutality
• cruelty
• inhumanity