Meaning & use
philistines
Last updated
People who are hostile or indifferent to art, culture, and intellectual pursuits.
See it in a sentence
The critics dismissed the town's council as philistines for cutting arts funding.
He worried that his children were growing up among philistines who never read.
A note on using this word
Lowercased, the word derives from the ancient Philistines, a historical rival people of the Israelites, and became a byword for cultural indifference through nineteenth-century usage by writers like Matthew Arnold.
Words with a similar meaning
barbariansboors
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
Words with an opposite meaning
aesthetesintellectuals
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