Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state or quality of being beastly; brutality; coarseness; vulgarity; filthiness.
  • noun Absence of reason; stupidity.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The state or quality of being beastly.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state of being beastly.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the quality of being deliberately mean
  • noun unpleasant nastiness; used especially of nasty weather

Etymologies

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Examples

  • If Mr. Marshall thinks that the current display of beastliness is oppressive, he should consider what the reaction of the Israeli Government would be toward the Palestinian terrorists if the late and unlamented dictator of Syria, Hafaz Assad was the prime minister.

    Matthew Yglesias » Does The Middle East Matter? 2007

  • Flyers 'talent supply matches up well, but their real advantage is in beastliness.

    USATODAY.com 2002

  • The Flyers 'talent supply matches up well, but their real advantage is in beastliness.

    USATODAY.com - A look at the first-round playoff matchups 2002

  • And again, a little later on in the same year, Punch compares the "beastliness" of Jenkins, "the life-long toad-eater," with the "beastly fellow" denounced in the Morning Post for swallowing twelve frogs for a wager!

    Mr. Punch`s history of modern England, Volume I -- 1841-1857 Charles Larcom 1921

  • She would have been quite willing to shew to her mother all these expressions of her lover's love; but she felt that it would not be fair to him to expose his allusions to the "beastliness" at the stations.

    An Eye for an Eye Anthony Trollope 1848

  • But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence -- you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes.

    Chapter 36 2010

  • It was great — an orgy under the sky, a contest of beaker-men, a study in primitive beastliness.

    Local Color 2010

  • This witty, wily challenger of all that we know or think we know about life and art, truth and illusion, beauty and beastliness, is brushing up against my thoughts once again.

    Tamsin Smith: Nabokov's Other Gift Tamsin Smith 2011

  • The sun drove through their skins, ripping and smashing tissues and nerves, till they became sick in mind and body, tossed most of the Decalogue overboard, descended to beastliness, drank themselves into quick graves, or survived so savagely that war vessels were sometimes sent to curb their license.

    A SON OF THE SUN 2010

  • And this scale of wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three children can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation, till decay and death end their suffering.

    THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE 2010

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