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Meaning of lowbrow in English:

lowbrow

Pronunciation /ˈləʊbraʊ/

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adjective

derogatory

  • Not highly intellectual or cultured.

    • ‘lowbrow tabloids’
    • ‘It is also true that more people will always be attracted to the passive, easy nature of lowbrow culture than those who will take the time to decipher high culture.’
    • ‘Conventional wisdom has it that kitsch - from the German language for ‘to throw together’ and implying popular or lowbrow taste - should be eschewed by the connoisseur, the lover of fine art.’
    • ‘This Christmas, remind the kids just how nice animation can be, with a cartoon genuine in its sentiment, free of pop culture references and lowbrow humor.’
    • ‘Finding a book with the right combination of highbrow intelligence and lowbrow kicks has gotten nearly impossible.’
    • ‘On one side you find the ruthless pursuit of profit and lowbrow culture.’
    • ‘Until recently I thought how-to books to be popular, in a lowbrow sort of way.’
    • ‘Deplorable as this preference may be, it's hardly as deplorable as the gulf which these cultural assumptions themselves created between the lowbrow public and the university-educated art world and artists.’
    • ‘I wanted people to look beyond what's cool in lowbrow art.’
    • ‘All these golden nuggets of wisdom come from The Reality TV Handbook, a new tome dedicated to the lowbrow television genre that is showing no signs of petering out.’
    • ‘Rather than present a biting satirical assailment on religion, I shall present a puerile, lowbrow rant on religion's younger brother, cult worship.’
    • ‘Some context: my flatmate was just back from London, I was just back from camping, we wanted two things - beer and a lowbrow action film.’
    • ‘A fan of lowbrow art, she built the fundraiser around the ‘art without canvas’ idea, choosing skate decks as her medium.’
    • ‘Their show, which comes to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this month, is a collision between lowbrow Las Vegas dazzle and highbrow European aesthetics.’
    • ‘In addition, the award presentation broadcast, long known for its critically panned, lowbrow fare, rambled on almost without a break.’
    • ‘But I worked on eight seasons of The Simpsons, and we certainly had our lowbrow jokes.’
    • ‘The context has provided a moment of unexpected, lowbrow hilarity.’
    • ‘And it's also a very lowbrow genre, that nobody is really paying attention to.’
    • ‘The show was initially ridiculed by many reviewers as the most abysmally lowbrow series in television history.’
    • ‘While some might question the appeal of a show set in such lowbrow circumstances, I found it refreshing.’
    • ‘Shakespeare in Love had at least 6 fantastic performances, a brilliant screenplay that mixed highbrow and lowbrow humor, and actually had some interesting things to say about love and the creative process.’
    mass-market, tabloid, pop, popular, intellectually undemanding, lightweight, easy to understand, accessible, unpretentious, simple, simplistic
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noun

derogatory

  • A lowbrow person.

    • ‘These long cerebral articles are not read by the lowbrows.’
    • ‘I can't write in a whole lot of different styles, trying to please the highbrows one time and the lowbrows the next.’
    • ‘I do not feel safe knowing that lowbrows have their fingers on nuclear bomb triggers.’
    • ‘Finally: just to admit I am a total lowbrow, I watched part of ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ the other morning, and I didn't like it.’
    • ‘In the 1999 series ‘Resolutions,’ Chicago continues to address the audience she has created of mainly middle- and working-class women, an audience easily dismissed by both highbrows and lowbrows.’
    • ‘If so, they were rewarded with a fresh perspective on a composer of astonishing versatility, one whose best work speaks to high- and lowbrows alike without condescending to either.’
    • ‘The disaffected mugger and the enraged cuckold were despised as lowbrows; the true craftsmen of murder inaugurated ever more elaborate schemes.’
    • ‘The lowbrows, for example, turn up at the night club.’
    • ‘Call me a lowbrow, a philistine if you like, but I wasn't lured to Vienna by any of these.’
    • ‘I think a lot of political lowbrows all around the world got a new lease on life when they saw how even somebody like him could get crowbarred into office.’
    lowbrow, anti-intellectual, materialist, bourgeois
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