embrute

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   rare or literary: to make someone brutal or brutish; to degrade someone to the level of a brute

   Years of unchecked violence can embrute both soldiers and civilians.

A variant of imbrute, formed from im- or em- ('cause to become') + brute. Brute came through French from Latin brutus ('heavy, dull, stupid'). The verb has been used since the seventeenth century for reducing a person to a brutal, coarse, or supposedly animal-like condition.

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