Word.ws English Dictionary

brute

/bɹuːt//bɹut/

brute adjective: without reason or intelligence (of animals). Also the obsolete spelling of bruit.

Adjective

brute (comparative more brute, superlative most brute)

  1. Without reason or intelligence (of animals).
    • a brute beast
  2. Characteristic of unthinking animals; senseless, unreasoning (of humans).
    • A creature […] not prone / And brute as other creatures, but endued / With sanctity of reason.1667, John Milton, “Book VII”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished...
  3. Unconnected with intelligence or thought; purely material, senseless.
    • the brute earth; the brute powers of nature
  4. Crude, unpolished.
    • a great brute farmer from Liddesdale1815 February 24, [Walter Scott], Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown...
  5. Strong, blunt, and spontaneous; being purely physical in nature.
    • I got the door open through brute force.
    • The two Gladiators, Kreugas and Damoxenos, a subject from Pausanias, is another work in the same grand style. There is a want of nobility both in the countenances and forms of the combatants, and the expression of brute strength is too little relieved by that of courage arid heroism. The gentlemen...1820, Floyd Lavern Darrow, The North American Review, Cummings and Hilliard, page 380
  6. Brutal; cruel; fierce; ferocious; savage; pitiless, without intelligence or reason.
    • brute violence

Noun

brute (plural brutes)

  1. (archaic) An animal seen as being without human reason; a senseless beast.
    • they laid before them how unbecoming it was the Dignity of such sublime Creatures to be sollicitous about gratifying those Appetites, which they had in common with Brutes, and at the same time unmindful of those higher qualities that gave them the preeminence over all visible Beings.1714, Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees
    • ‘That animal has a charmed life,’ he said; ‘but you can say this only of brutes in this country. No man - you apprehend me? - no man here bears a charmed life.’1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I, page 218
  2. A person with the characteristics of an unthinking animal; a coarse or brutal person, particularly one who is dim-witted.
    • One of them was a hulking brute of a man, heavily tattooed and with a hardened face that practically screamed "I just got out of jail."
    • She was frankly disappointed. For some reason she had expected to discover a burglar of one or another accepted type—either a dashing cracksman in full-blown evening dress, lithe, polished, pantherish, or a common yegg, a red-eyed, unshaven, burly brute in the rags and tatters of a tramp.1914 November, Louis Joseph Vance, “An Outsider […]”, in Munsey’s Magazine, volume LIII, number II, New York, N.Y.: The Frank A[ndrew] Munsey Company, […], published 1915, →OCLC, chapter III...
  3. A kind of powerful spotlight.
    • For a scene like the Highgate exhumation night sequence suitable equipment would consist of: two brutes on Molevators, three 10 K lights also on Molevators and, for good measure, two 5 Ks, four 2 Ks, two pups (1000 W), two North lights […]1976, A. Arthur Englander, Paul Petzold, Filming for Television, page 191
    • At the other extreme, with limitless budgets all they have to do is dream up amazing lighting rigs to be constructed and operated by the huge team of gaffers and sparks, with their generators, discharge lights, flags, gobos and brutes.1999, Des Lyver, Graham Swainson, Basics of Video Lighting, page 103
  4. (UK, archaic, Cambridge University slang) One who has not yet matriculated.

Verb

brute (third-person singular simple present brutes, present participle bruting, simple past and past participle bruted)

  1. (transitive) To shape (diamonds) by grinding them against each other.

Also used as

brute is also the obsolete spelling of bruit.

brute meaning in Bengali

brute in Bengali

ব্রুট

Examples of brute in a sentence

  • There is a want of nobility both in the countenances and forms of the combatants, and the expression of brute strength is too little relieved by that of courage arid heroism.1820, Floyd Lavern Darrow, The North American Review, Cummings and Hilliard, page 380:
  • When brute force is meant to be represented, it is figured in all its fierceness, as in the colossal lion with vast wide-open jaws, found in one of the temples at Nimrud.1868, Edward Bouverie Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, Nine Lectures, James Parker, Printing-Press of the Devonport Society, page 114:
  • K. the sacrifice of all-round performance to mere brute might, he saved the owner of the 3400 r. p. m.1916, Floyd Lavern Darrow, Kansas Farmer, Kansas Farmer Company, pages 136-137:
  • But the brutes are more chivalrous than man—they do not stoop to cowardly intrigue.”1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1963, page 96:

All 40 example sentences with brute

Forms of brute

Adjective
comparativemore brute
superlativemost brute
Noun
pluralbrutes
Verb
third-person singular presentbrutes
present participlebruting
past participlebruted
pastbruted

Plural of brute: brutes

Origin of brute

From Middle French brut, from Old French brut, from Latin brūtus (“dull, stupid, insensible”), an Oscan loanword, from Proto-Indo-European *gʷréh₂us (“heavy”). Cognate with Ancient Greek βαρύς (barús), Persian گران (gerân) and Sanskrit गुरु (gurú) (English guru).

Words formed from brute

Phrases with brute

Words that rhyme with brute

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about brute

What does brute mean?
Brute means without reason or intelligence (of animals).
What is brute in Bengali?
Brute in Bengali is ব্রুট. See Brute meaning in Bengali.
How do you use brute in a sentence?
There is a want of nobility both in the countenances and forms of the combatants, and the expression of brute strength is too little relieved by that of courage arid heroism.
What part of speech is brute?
Brute can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce brute?
Brute is pronounced /bɹuːt/ (UK).

Words near brute in the dictionary

  1. brutalizes
  2. brutalizing
  3. brutally
  4. brutalness
  5. Brutasha
  6. brute
  7. brute de forge
  8. brute fact
  9. brute facts
  10. brute for punishment
  11. brute force

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brute (page history and authors); brute (Bengali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-I learned some phrases-bruit.wav, en-us-brute.ogg.

Cite this entry: “brute.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/brute. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.