beetle-browed
Americanadjective
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having heavy projecting eyebrows.
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scowling or sullen.
adjective
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having bushy or overhanging eyebrows
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sullen in appearance; scowling
Etymology
Origin of beetle-browed
1325–75; Middle English bitel-browed, probably with bitel sharp(-edged), Old English *bitel ( see beetle 1); see brow, -ed 3
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
There he is, a burly, beetle-browed man of 60, handing out hot tea on the beaches at Lesbos, comforting a traumatised woman inside a makeshift studio and cooking kebabs on a barbecue at a dusty refugee camp.
From The Guardian ● Sep. 17, 2017
The voice too is the one we know so well from the films and summons the familiar face: lugubrious, disheveled, and beetle-browed, perennially squinting as though against the blinding light of the universe’s final catastrophe.
From Slate ● May 5, 2015
He has, Mr. Gardiner writes, “the look of a man etched with life’s travails — beetle-browed, with shallow eye sockets, asymmetrical eyes and slightly droopy eyelids.”
From New York Times ● Apr. 29, 2015
These are some of the latest findings on our beetle-browed relatives—the studies seem to be arriving every few weeks now—and they’ve had the unsettling effect of making them seem ever more like us.
From The New Yorker ● Feb. 12, 2015
Neither my new long reach nor Chapter Eleven’s beetle-browed concentration was sufficient to counter Milton’s wicked spin or his “killer shot” which left red marks on our chests, through our clothes.
From "Middlesex: A Novel" by Jeffrey Eugenides
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
