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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Barbarous \Bar"ba*rous\, adjective [L. barbarus, Gr. ba'rbaros, strange, foreign; later, slavish, rude, ignorant; akin to L. balbus stammering, Skr. barbara stammering, outlandish. Cf. {Brave}, adjective]
1. Being in the state of a barbarian; uncivilized; rude; peopled with barbarians; as, a barbarous people; a barbarous country.
2. Foreign; adapted to a barbaric taste. [Obs.]
Barbarous gold. --Dryden.
3. Cruel; ferocious; inhuman; merciless.
By their barbarous usage he died within a few days, to the grief of all that knew him. --Clarendon.
4. Contrary to the pure idioms of a language.
A barbarous expression --G. Campbell.
Syn: Uncivilized; unlettered; uncultivated; untutored; ignorant; merciless; brutal. See {Ferocious}.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
barbarous
adjective
1: (of persons or their actions) able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering; "a barbarous crime"; "brutal beatings"; "cruel tortures"; "Stalin's roughshod treatment of the kulaks"; "a savage slap"; "vicious kicks" [syn: {brutal}, {cruel}, {fell}, {roughshod}, {savage}, {vicious}]
2: primitive in customs and culture
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
174 Moby Thesaurus words for "barbarous": Doric, Draconian, Gothic, Neanderthal, Philistine, Tartarean, alien, animal, anthropophagous, atrocious, backward, barbarian, barbaric, beastly, benighted, bestial, bloodthirsty, bloody, bloody-minded, bookless, brutal, brutalized, brute, brutish, cacophonous, cannibalistic, careless, clumsy, coarse, cretinous, crude, cruel, cruel-hearted, deceived, demoniac, demoniacal, devilish, diabolic, doggerel, dysphemistic, erroneous, exotic, exterior, external, extraneous, extraterrestrial, extrinsic, faulty, fell, feral, ferine, ferocious, fiendish, fiendlike, fierce, foreign, foreign-born, functionally illiterate, graceless, grammarless, gross, harsh, heathen, hellish, hoodwinked, ignorant, ill-bred, ill-educated, illiterate, impolite, imprecise, improper, impure, in bad taste, inconcinnate, inconcinnous, incorrect, indecorous, inelegant, infelicitous, infernal, inhuman, inhumane, intrusive, kill-crazy, led astray, loose, low, lowbrow, malign, malignant, merciless, misinformed, misinstructed, mistaught, murderous, noncivilized, nonintellectual, outland, outlandish, outside, pagan, philistine, pitiless, primitive, rough-and-ready, rude, ruthless, sadistic, sanguinary, sanguineous, satanic, savage, sharkish, slavering, slipshod, slovenly, solecistic, strange, subhuman, tameless, tasteless, troglodytic, truculent, ulterior, unbooked, unbookish, unbooklearned, unbriefed, unchristian, uncivil, uncivilized, uncombed, unconscionable, uncourtly, uncouth, uncultivated, uncultured, undignified, unearthly, unedified, uneducated, unerudite, uneuphonious, unfelicitous, ungentle, ungodly, ungraceful, ungrammatic, unguided, unholy, unhuman, uninstructed, unintellectual, unkempt, unlearned, unlettered, unlicked, unliterary, unpolished, unread, unrefined, unscholarly, unschooled, unseemly, unstudious, untamed, untaught, untutored, vicious, vulgar, wicked, wild, wolfish
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