Word.ws English Dictionary

no-brow

no-brow adjective: completely devoid of cultural or educational value.

Adjective

no-brow (comparative more no-brow, superlative most no-brow)

  1. Completely devoid of cultural or educational value.
    • From no-brow beginnings, when BSG [Battlestar Galactica] still had to prove it had outwitted the shonky source material, the show gained cult respect and a few more viewers by the second year.2008 April 15, Daniel Martin, “How will Battlestar Galactica end?”, in The Guardian
    • During the 2000s, belles-lettres accounted for less than 3 percent of all literature sold in the United States, and popular literature made gains in prestige and legitimacy, spawning a no-brow culture.2010, Roger Chapman, editor, Culture Wars […] , page 325
  2. Located outside the traditional taste hierarchy, blending highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow.
    • The Simpsons is pure Nobrow, able to slide as effortlessly as Bob himself from slide-whistling slapstick to talk of Susan Sontag, and ultimately oblivious to any prejudicial classifications. It's not such much that lowbrow bludgeoned highbrow to death with a dozen rakes; it's that both of them have...2005, Chris Turner, Planet Simpson […] , Ebury Press, →ISBN, page 140

Forms of no-brow

comparativemore no-brow
superlativemost no-brow
alternative formnobrow

Origin of no-brow

Blend of no + lowbrow. Popularized by writer John Seabrook in Nobrow: the culture of marketing, the marketing of culture (2000).

Questions about no-brow

What does no-brow mean?
No-brow means completely devoid of cultural or educational value.
What part of speech is no-brow?
No-brow is an adjective.

Words near no-brow in the dictionary

  1. no-bills
  2. no-brainer
  3. no-brainers
  4. no-break space
  5. no-break spaces
  6. no-brow
  7. no-build
  8. no-call-no-show
  9. no-call-no-shows
  10. no-CD
  11. no-CDs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: no-brow (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: “no-brow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/no-brow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.