Extremely cruel, savage, or uncivilized; showing brutal and violent behavior without mercy.
From Latin 'barbarus,' which Greeks used to describe foreign peoples who didn't speak Greek (literally 'bar-bar' for their unintelligible speech sounds). The term evolved to mean 'primitive' or 'cruel.'
The word literally comes from 'ba-ba' sounds—Greeks thought other languages sounded like gibberish, so 'barbarous' started as racism and evolved into a label for cruelty, showing how prejudice shapes vocabulary!
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