Philistine

Noun

 * 1) A person who lacks appreciation of art or culture.
 * 2) A person from ancient Philistia.

Adjective

 * 1) Of or pertaining to the ancient Philistines.
 * 2) Lacking appreciation of culture; also philistine.

Thesaurus 1
earthly, earthy, epicier, flinty, formalist, functionally illiterate, general, grammarless, groundling, guttersnipe, hard, hardened, hardhearted, heathen, high-camp, homely, homespun, hoodwinked, hooligan, ill-bred fellow, ill-educated, illiterate, impervious, indurated, insensitive, inured, kitschy, led astray, looby, lout, low fellow, low-camp, lowbrow, material, materialistic, methodologist, middle-class type, misinformed, misinstructed, mistaught, model child, mucker, mundane, nonintellectual, nouveau riche, ordinary, organization man, pachydermatous, pagan, parrot, parvenu, peasant, pedant, perfectionist, plastic person, plebeian, pop, popular, precisian, precisianist, profane, proof against, public, ribald, rough, roughneck, rowdy, rude, ruffian, secular, sheep, square, steeled against, steely, stony, teenybopper, temporal, terrestrial, thick-skinned, trimmer, unbooked, unbookish, unbooklearned, unbriefed, uncultivated, uncultured, unedified, uneducated, unerudite, unguided, uninstructed, unintellectual, unlearned, unlettered, unliterary, unread, unrefined, unscholarly, unschooled, unspiritual, unstudious, untaught, untutored, upstart, vernacular, vulgarian, vulgarist, worldly, yes-man, yokel, Babbitt, Babbittish, Gothic, Middle American, anal character, arriviste, barbarous, bookless, boor, bounder, bourgeois, burgher, cad, callous, calloused, campy, carnal, carnal-minded, case-hardened, churl, clown, common, commonplace, compulsive character, conformer, conformist, conventionalist, deceived,

Thesaurus 2
Babbitt, Boeotian, barbarian, boeotian, boob, boor, boorish, boring, bourgeois, capitalist, clown, commercial, commonplace, crass, dull, ignoramus, lout, lowbrow, materialist, materialistic, middlebrow, narrow-minded, prosaic, tasteless, uncultivated, uncultured, uneducated, unenlightened, unlearned, unlettered, unread, unrefined, untutored, vulgarian, yahoo

Alternative forms

 * philistine

Etymology
From Philistinus:, from Late  Φυλιστῖνοι: from  פלשתים: from פלשת:.

The sense relating to lack of education and culture was introduced to English by Thomas Carlyle and greatly popularised by Matthew Arnold. It is derived from student use of the term Philister: to refer to the burghers of the town. This apparently derived from the use of the biblical text "the Philistines be upon you, Samson" in a memorial service for a Jena university student who died as the result of a town vs. gown dispute in 1693.

Related terms

 * Palestine
 * Philistia
 * philistine

Noun

 * Armenian:
 * Czech:
 * Danish: filister
 * Finnish:
 * French: Philistin
 * Hebrew: פלשתי
 * Hungarian:


 * Irish: Filistíneach
 * Italian:
 * Japanese: ペリシテ人
 * Old Irish:
 * Polish: Filistyn
 * Portuguese:
 * Russian: филистимлянин


 * Armenian:
 * Chinese:
 * Mandarin: 俗人
 * Czech: ,
 * Danish:
 * Finnish: ,


 * French: philistin
 * German: ,
 * Hungarian:
 * Polish: filister
 * Portuguese:
 * Russian: филистер, обыватель, мещанин

Adjective

 * Finnish:
 * Irish: Filistíneach


 * Polish: filistyński
 * Russian: филистимский