How to Use barbarian in a Sentence

barbarian

1 of 2 noun

• For the past two years, my daughter has been a barbarian.
  — Emily McGowin, The Week, 26 Apr. 2022
• This film is filled with twists, and the true barbarian isn’t so obvious.
  — Claudia Guthrie, ELLE, 29 Aug. 2023
• To set things right, Elgin needs the strength of Holga, a barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez).
  — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 22 July 2022
• He was supposed to be the Goldilocks candidate, one just radical enough for the barbarians and just posh enough for the guys who sign the checks.
  — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 17 July 2023
• A few weeks later, a barbarian with a spear was sitting in the Vice-President’s chair.
  — Luke Mogelson, The New Yorker, 15 Jan. 2021
• The blond barbarian, based on a popular set of Mattel toys, may finally win the day.
  — Matt Donnelly, Variety, 13 Nov. 2023
• Homer contrasts the barbarians with the civilized Greeks.
  — Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, 2 Oct. 2023
• Rodriguez, who plays a barbarian called Holga, also had a great deal of working out to do in preparation for the part.
  — Nick Romano, EW.com, 21 July 2022
• What kind of man nearly has his territory wrested from him by a lady, and a barbarian to boot?
  — Anne Thériault, Longreads, 14 May 2021
• Whoever the barbarian is is the one who invaded somebody’s safe space.
  — Vulture, 30 Sep. 2022
• The film never underlines who the titular barbarian is, but part of the fun is deciding for yourself where to pin that label.
  — David Sims, The Atlantic, 4 Nov. 2022
• In addition, the Chinese nation now officially includes peoples, such as the Turkic Uighurs and the Mongolians, who would have been called barbarians in the past.
  — Ian Buruma, Harper's Magazine, 11 Jan. 2022
• The incessant hammering was freaking out his dog, who responded as if barbarians were laying siege to their home.
  — Andy Greenberg, WIRED, 14 Nov. 2023
• First, the author immediately notes that for every swarthy barbarian there is a depiction of another trope, the Evil Blonde Guy.
  — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 21 Apr. 2011
• The story centers on a barbarian, an assassin, and a witch who form an uneasy alliance in order to obtain a magical relic.
  — Borys Kit, The Hollywood Reporter, 22 Feb. 2023
• His hopes, as in 2016, depend on finding a large bloc of voters who, while considering the president a clown and a barbarian, still barely prefer him to the alternative.
  — D.j. Tice, Star Tribune, 26 Oct. 2020
• Logan Roy, the patriarch on Succession, is an immigrant from humble origins turned the ultimate barbarian at the gate.
  — Jason Diamond, Town & Country, 14 Feb. 2022
• The real barbarian was probably my character and Richard Brake’s Frank character.
  — Vulture, 30 Sep. 2022
• However, with no written records save for those produced by Chinese chroniclers who regarded the Xiongnu as barbarians, the empire and its people have long remained in the shadows of history.
  — Katie Hunt, CNN, 17 Apr. 2023
• To deny classic literature was to brand yourself a barbarian.
  — John Kass, Star Tribune, 7 Feb. 2021
• Vecna begin to vanish), and the gulag (where Hopper goes full barbarian to battle a demogorgon with just a sword) is fast, furious, and vastly more exciting than the earlier attempts at bouncing from group to group.
  — Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 1 July 2022
• Many of those making their way in the new Washington are coarser and some are seedier, but for the most part the political establishment has adapted surprisingly nimbly to the barbarians’ onslaught.
  — Alex Shephard, Washington Post, 6 June 2023
• In the tabletop simulation, players craft their own characters and backstories, becoming anyone from a barbarian to a sorcerer.
  — Teresa Nowakowski, Smithsonian Magazine, 31 Mar. 2023
• Native Americans have long been depicted in Hollywood films and television projects as either bloodthirsty barbarians or noble savages.
  — Marlow Stern, Rolling Stone, 9 June 2023
• Investing with the barbarians can be very lucrative, but is financially possible only for the megabucks crowd—institutions like pension programs and very rich individuals.
  — Larry Light, Fortune, 13 July 2023
• Execution is a universal punishment for treason; only barbarians violate civilized norms in meting it out.
  — Daniel Foster, National Review, 30 Nov. 2023
• For the past two years, my daughter has been a barbarian.
  — Emily McGowin, The Week, 26 Apr. 2022
• This film is filled with twists, and the true barbarian isn’t so obvious.
  — Claudia Guthrie, ELLE, 29 Aug. 2023
• To set things right, Elgin needs the strength of Holga, a barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez).
  — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 22 July 2022
• He was supposed to be the Goldilocks candidate, one just radical enough for the barbarians and just posh enough for the guys who sign the checks.
  — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 17 July 2023

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barbarian

2 of 2 adjective

• Would Trump the barbarian have been elected president of the United States even 10 or 20 years ago?
  — John Kass, Twin Cities, 1 June 2017
• Rodriguez sells the barbarian-with-a-heart-of-gold archetype perfectly.
  — WIRED, 31 Mar. 2023
• Medea New adaptation of the classic Greek tragedy about the barbarian princess scorned by her husband, the hero Jason.
  — Matt Cooper, latimes.com, 3 Sep. 2017
• In the Analects, China’s greatest sage expressed a desire to live among barbarian tribes.
  — Michael Schuman, The Atlantic, 5 Oct. 2020
• Mitchell, in particular, seems to be quite the barbarian.
  — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 21 June 2017
• Egypt itself barely managed to hold onto its sense of self in the face of barbarian attacks.
  — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 15 May 2013
• But how many smart Russians would continue to work for this barbarian regime?
  — Elliot Kaufman, WSJ, 25 May 2022
• The Warrior looks like a bandit class, or perhaps barbarian.
  — Erik Kain, Forbes, 11 Nov. 2021
• The barbarian stuck behind the glass now indeed had two separate brows, but they were arched far above its eyes as if sketched by a cartoon artist.
  — Iman Hariri-Kia, Teen Vogue, 2 Oct. 2017
• There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus.
  — John E. McIntyre, baltimoresun.com, 29 Aug. 2017
• There was no murderous onslaught of barbarian tribes and no landslide of refugees escaping the arrival of the Huns from Central Asia.
  — Peter Brown, The New York Review of Books, 24 Sep. 2020
• Pine as the pure-hearted thief Edgin is in full-on charm mode, and Michelle Rodriguez’s brute barbarian fighter Holga is also often played for laughs.
  — Todd Martens, Los Angeles Times, 10 Mar. 2023
• But Charlie Gard shows that the barbarian no longer comes wielding a club and grunting in some undecipherable tongue.
  — William McGurn, WSJ, 17 July 2017
• In fact, the line is found in a speech that Tacitus quotes (or invents), delivered by a barbarian chieftain, Calgacus, on the eve of a battle against Roman forces.
  — James Romm, WSJ, 2 Oct. 2023
• So, too, was debt imprisonment, which existed in the barbarian kingdoms that followed the Roman Empire in the West.
  — Kristin Collier, Longreads, 1 Dec. 2021
• After their interrogation, one is dead, and the other has confessed to a barbarian plot.
  — Jocelyn Noveck, Star Tribune, 5 Aug. 2020
• Besieged by barbarian raiders, his parents prayed to their gods for a miracle, and were gifted this unstoppable warrior for a son.
  — Christian Holub, EW.com, 10 Mar. 2023
• The Amazigh are better known as Berbers, but that’s actually a pejorative name, derived from the word barbarian.
  — Terri Colby, Philly.com, 20 Sep. 2017
• To Barr, the philosophical-civic consensus arrayed against the city of God is something akin to the barbarian hordes besieging Rome in Augustine’s time.
  — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 8 June 2020
• His best friend is Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez) a barbarian warrior with a heart of gold, also now living a life of skullduggery.
  — Erik Kain, Forbes, 1 Apr. 2023
• Built on the site of an ancient Roman fortress that protected the empire from barbarian invasion, the castle was constructed between the 11th and 14th centuries.
  — Joe Yogerst, CNN, 11 May 2023
• Wave after wave of barbarian invaders came at the empire and eventually overwhelmed it.
  — Andrew Doran, National Review, 3 Mar. 2022
• Murray with a flamethrower and Hopper with a barbarian sword is entertaining.
  — Erik Kain, Forbes, 4 July 2022
• The idea was both exhilarating and daunting, inspiring an outpouring of thrilling stories about barbarian women who were as brave and skilled in war as men.
  — National Geographic, 18 June 2020
• The migration of Goths across Europe is often characterised as a barbarian invasion, but the story told here is of families struggling to survive rather than thugs fighting for the hell of it.
  — The Economist, 20 June 2020
• And there’s a fair amount of action, particularly in an arc that finds Salvor trying to protect Terminus from a visiting barbarian race.
  — Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 24 Sep. 2021
• There, Fredegund raided one of the treasury storerooms and, like a traditional barbarian king, distributed the valuables among the soldiers.
  — Shelley Puhak, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Jan. 2022
• Odin appears in multiple pre-Christian barbarian belief systems across northern Europe in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west.
  — Patrick Smith, NBC News, 8 Mar. 2023
• Players design characters that can range from humans to elves to dwarves and beyond and then select a class such as paladin, fighter, ranger, barbarian or several others.
  — Joe Otterson, Variety, 14 Apr. 2023
• Holga was booted from her ancient barbarian tribe for falling in love with an outsider—a halfling (D. & D.-speak for hobbit) who repaid Holga’s devotion by breaking up with her.
  — Ed Park, The New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2023

Last Updated: 5 Sep 2024