Barbaric

How to spell barbaric

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce barbaric

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does barbaric mean?

1. adjectiveSavagely cruel, brutal, or harsh in a way that shocks civilised sensibilities.
2. adjectivePrimitive, crude, or lacking refinement and culture.

Barbaric in a sentence

• The report described the prison conditions as barbaric and inhumane.

• She joked that the office coffee machine was a barbaric contraption from the last century.

• Critics called the punishment a barbaric relic of an earlier age.

• The hotel's plumbing was so barbaric that guests boiled their own water.

Where does barbaric come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek barbaros, a term the ancient Greeks used for anyone who was not Greek, especially someone whose speech sounded like meaningless babble. The root is widely thought to be imitative, mimicking the 'bar bar' noise that unfamiliar foreign languages seemed to make to Greek ears, so the doubled 'bar' syllable is built into the very origin of the word. From Greek it passed into Latin as barbaricus, meaning foreign or outlandish, and then into Old French and Middle English, arriving in English around the 1400s. Over time the meaning hardened from merely 'foreign and strange' into 'uncivilised, savage, and brutally cruel'. Remembering that ancient mocking echo of 'bar-bar' is a handy way to keep both r-bearing syllables in the spelling, since the trap is forgetting that second 'bar'.

How the word is built

• barbar- (from Greek barbaros: foreign, non-Greek)
• -ic (adjective suffix)