Word.ws English Dictionary

half-bred

half-bred adjective: not well-bred; imperfectly trained or ill-acquainted to good manners.

Adjective

half-bred (not comparable)

  1. not well-bred; imperfectly trained or ill-acquainted to good manners.
    • He that is but Half a Philoſopher, is in danger of being an Atheiſt; an Half-Phyſician is apt to turn Empiric; an Half-Bred man is conceited in his Addreſs, and troubleſome in his Converſation.1694 November 6 (date delivered; Gregorian calendar), Francis Atterbury, “A Scorner Incapable of True Wisdom. A Sermon Preach’d before the Queen at White-hall. October 28. 1694.”, in Fourteen Sermons...
    • "Set out eh whiskey. Jimmy, ye bum!
      Belly the bar, ye half bred scum!1925, Robert Ervin Howard, John L. Sullivan
  2. (obsolete) Half-blooded.
    • The progeny were tame, worked in yoke, exceeded the ox in strength, and retained the wallowing habit. All the half-bred heifers were fertile, but the half-bred bulls were not. Colonel George C. Thompson, of Shawnee Springs, Ky., concurrently with Mr. Wickliffe's experiment, domesticated a buffalo...1889 April, John Wesley Dafoe, “Domestication of the Buffalo”, in Popular Science Monthly
  3. (derogatory, often) half-breed (of mixed ethnicity)
    • “Captain Alphonse was delighted at this, for we had only half a dozen good seamen on board, the rest of the hands being a lot of half-bred mulattoes and niggers—some of the scourings of South America whom he had picked up at La Guayra, most of whom knew how to handle a cutlass better than a rope—so...1901, John Conroy Hutcheson, The Ghost Ship
    • On hearing the usual salutation, however, I turned round and saw a lean and withered half-bred Masai, clothed in a very inadequate piece of wildebeeste hide which was merely slipped under the left arm and looped up in a knot over the right shoulder. He stood for a moment with the right hand held...1907, John Henry Patterson, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, Chapter 23

Noun

half-bred (plural half-breds)

  1. A half-blooded animal.
    • The Leicesters and half-breds are purchased by farmers who keep no breeding stock: they are well turniped during the winter, and clipped and fattened in the following season.1869, Sheep: Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases, page 328
  2. A half-breed

half-bred meaning in Tamil

half-bred in Tamil

ஒரு வகைக் கலப்பினம்

Forms of half-bred

pluralhalf-breds

Origin of half-bred

From half- + bred.

Questions about half-bred

What does half-bred mean?
Half-bred means not well-bred; imperfectly trained or ill-acquainted to good manners.
What is half-bred in Tamil?
Half-bred in Tamil is ஒரு வகைக் கலப்பினம். See Half-bred meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is half-bred?
Half-bred can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near half-bred in the dictionary

  1. half-boots
  2. half-bound
  3. half-brained
  4. half-break
  5. half-breaks
  6. half-bred
  7. half-breds
  8. half-breed
  9. half-breeds
  10. half-brethren
  11. half-broken

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: half-bred (page history and authors); half-bred (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). 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.

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