Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state or quality of being brutish in nature, disposition, or appearance; savageness.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The characteristic of being brutish.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Not the cuteness exactly, but people generally stumble when trying to make female versions of the ugly humanoids; a certain kind of brutishness fits much more neatly into people's idealized male than idealized female.

    Ragnarok Musings

  • The American business magazine decried the bear's "brutishness" and its threat to an interdependent world; labeled Russia "a gangster state" ruled by a "kleptocracy."

    Foreign Policy In Focus

  • Here were coarseness and brutishness -- a thing savage, primordial, ferocious.

    Chapter 4

  • Not only does she dress and sing like Marilyn Monroe, she has that bruised blond Bus Stop attitude, the beauty of the butterfly about to be stomped by the steel-toed boot of male brutishness.

    Thelma Adams: Naughty, Naughty: Carey Mulligan's Nude in Shame, Too

  • She was aware only of the brutishness of this man's hands and mind.

    CHAPTER VII

  • Larry could stand no more than an hour in irons, at which time his stupid brutishness overcame any fear he might have possessed, because he bellowed out to the poop to come down and loose him for a fair fight.

    CHAPTER XIX

  • They were a gorgeous group and though they lacked the brutishness of the Beholders, they still gave every appearance of being dangerous.

    Arcane Circle

  • Here was killing without cause, an orgy of blind-brutishness, a thing monstrously irrational.

    CHAPTER XV

  • American war talk is this utterly weird mixture of anger and self-pity and bragging and fear and whining and brutishness.

    Matthew Yglesias » For Better Thinking

  • A cruel thing happened just before supper, indicative of the callousness and brutishness of these men.

    Chapter 6

Comments

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  • Here, here, oh here! Euridice,

    Here was she slaine ;

    Her soule 'still'd through a veine :

    The Gods knew lesse

    That time Divinitie,

    Then ev'n, ev'n these

    Of brutishnesse.

    - Richard Lovelace, 'Orpheus to Beasts'.

    February 7, 2009