"no-brow" meaning in English

See no-brow in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

Forms: more no-brow [comparative], most no-brow [superlative]
Etymology: Blend of no + lowbrow. Popularized by writer John Seabrook in Nobrow: the culture of marketing, the marketing of culture (2000). Etymology templates: {{blend|en|no|lowbrow}} Blend of no + lowbrow Head templates: {{en-adj}} no-brow (comparative more no-brow, superlative most no-brow)
  1. Completely devoid of cultural or educational value.
    Sense id: en-no-brow-en-adj-m9yysdS4
  2. Located outside the traditional taste hierarchy, blending highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow.
    Sense id: en-no-brow-en-adj-aT0RVogn Categories (other): English blends, English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English blends: 25 75 Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 15 85
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: nobrow Coordinate_terms: lowbrow, middlebrow, highbrow

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for no-brow meaning in English (2.9kB)

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  "coordinate_terms": [
    {
      "_dis1": "0 0",
      "word": "lowbrow"
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    {
      "_dis1": "0 0",
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      "args": {
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  "etymology_text": "Blend of no + lowbrow. Popularized by writer John Seabrook in Nobrow: the culture of marketing, the marketing of culture (2000).",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "more no-brow",
      "tags": [
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    {
      "form": "most no-brow",
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "adj",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2008 April 15, Daniel Martin, “How will Battlestar Galactica end?”, in The Guardian",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2010, Roger Chapman, editor, Culture Wars […], page 325",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2013, Carol Stabile, Prime Time Animation",
          "text": "The tremendous concern and fascination with South Park's “no-brow” humor (Wild 1998: 32) has largely deflected attention away from an equally interesting and significant factor in the show's history and status as a cultural artifact.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
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        "Completely devoid of cultural or educational value."
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    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "_dis": "25 75",
          "kind": "other",
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          "parents": [],
          "source": "w+disamb"
        },
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          "_dis": "15 85",
          "kind": "other",
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          "parents": [
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          "source": "w+disamb"
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      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2005, Chris Turner, Planet Simpson […], Ebury Press, page 140",
          "text": "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 been subsumed into the one-stop-shopping megamall of pop.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
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        "Located outside the traditional taste hierarchy, blending highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow."
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  "wikipedia": [
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  "word": "no-brow"
}
{
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    "English blends",
    "English entries with incorrect language header",
    "English lemmas",
    "English multiword terms"
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  "coordinate_terms": [
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      "word": "lowbrow"
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    }
  ],
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  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "more no-brow",
      "tags": [
        "comparative"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "most no-brow",
      "tags": [
        "superlative"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "no-brow (comparative more no-brow, superlative most no-brow)",
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  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "adj",
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        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
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        {
          "ref": "2008 April 15, Daniel Martin, “How will Battlestar Galactica end?”, in The Guardian",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2010, Roger Chapman, editor, Culture Wars […], page 325",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2013, Carol Stabile, Prime Time Animation",
          "text": "The tremendous concern and fascination with South Park's “no-brow” humor (Wild 1998: 32) has largely deflected attention away from an equally interesting and significant factor in the show's history and status as a cultural artifact.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
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          "ref": "2005, Chris Turner, Planet Simpson […], Ebury Press, page 140",
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          "type": "quotation"
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  "synonyms": [
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      "word": "nobrow"
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  "wikipedia": [
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  "word": "no-brow"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-12 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (ae36afe and 304864d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.