nasty, brutish, and short
nasty, brutish, and short adjective: of a hypothetical state of human life, without a government or society, and marked by constant fear, violence, and insecurity.
Adjective
nasty, brutish, and short
- Of a hypothetical state of human life, without a government or society, and marked by constant fear, violence, and insecurity.
- America’s poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the poverty barrier. But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 ([…]): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.2013 June 1, “Towards the end of poverty”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, archived from the original on 05 Sep 2024, page 11
Origin of nasty, brutish, and short
Mentioned in 1651 in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes: No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Questions about nasty, brutish, and short
- What does nasty, brutish, and short mean?
- Nasty, brutish, and short means of a hypothetical state of human life, without a government or society, and marked by constant fear, violence, and insecurity.
- What part of speech is nasty, brutish, and short?
- Nasty, brutish, and short is an adjective.
Words near nasty, brutish, and short in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: nasty, brutish, and short (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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