caveman

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   an early human popularly imagined as living in caves

   The cartoon showed a caveman painting an animal on a cave wall.

2. 2
   noun

   informal and disapproving: a man considered crude, aggressive, or extremely old-fashioned in his attitudes

   His colleagues challenged the caveman assumptions behind the remark.

A compound of cave + man, popularized by nineteenth-century ideas and images of prehistoric humans as habitual cave dwellers. The insulting modern sense transfers that stereotype of primitiveness to crude behaviour or regressive attitudes.

Topics