Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Semibarbarian; half-civilized.
  • noun A half-civilized person; a semibarbarian.

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

  • adjective Half savage.
  • noun One who is half savage.

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

  • noun One who is half savage.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

semi- +‎ savage

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Examples

  • The aristocratic families in Granada, his hometown, had never fully welcomed the man they regarded as a “semisavage Indian” into their exclusive circle.

    Devil Dog David Talbot 2010

  • He explained that alcohol is “a loathsome excretion of a living organism”; that it will make a civilized young man successively “become semicivilized, semisavage, savage, and, at last, below the brute”; that “nearly two-thirds of all the money in circulation in America in the course of a year” passed through the grasping hands of the liquor trust.

    LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

  • He explained that alcohol is “a loathsome excretion of a living organism”; that it will make a civilized young man successively “become semicivilized, semisavage, savage, and, at last, below the brute”; that “nearly two-thirds of all the money in circulation in America in the course of a year” passed through the grasping hands of the liquor trust.

    LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

  • These barbaric societies have their place and give vigor; but if unreduced later, as in many unsettled portions of this country, a semisavage state of society results.

    Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene G. Stanley Hall 1885

  • That there was but one better quality which pertained to her semisavage disposition -- the faculty of physical fortitude and self-sacrifice, and another, though not always an attribute of the noble savage -- Truth.

    Selected Stories of Bret Harte Bret Harte 1869

  • Jessica solves her problem by acquiring a huge, semisavage, red-eyed mastiff dog, which she keeps tied up and straining at the leash in a kennel between her own and her husband’s twin beds.

    PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

  • Jessica solves her problem by acquiring a huge, semisavage, red-eyed mastiff dog, which she keeps tied up and straining at the leash in a kennel between her own and her husband’s twin beds.

    PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

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