No-brow
adj ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Completely devoid of cultural or educational value.
"From no-brow beginnings, when BSG [Battlestar Galactica] still had to prove it had outwitted the shonky source material, the show gained cult respect and a few more viewers by the second year."
- 2 Located outside the traditional taste hierarchy, blending highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow.
"The Simpsons is pure Nobrow, able to slide as effortlessly as Bob himself from slide-whistling slapstick to talk of Susan Sontag, and ultimately oblivious to any prejudicial classifications. It's not such much that lowbrow bludgeoned highbrow to death with a dozen rakes; it's that both of them have been subsumed into the one-stop-shopping megamall of pop."
Example
More examples"From no-brow beginnings, when BSG [Battlestar Galactica] still had to prove it had outwitted the shonky source material, the show gained cult respect and a few more viewers by the second year."
Etymology
Blend of no + lowbrow. Popularized by writer John Seabrook in Nobrow: the culture of marketing, the marketing of culture (2000).
More for "no-brow"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.