Other forms: highbrows
Highbrow means appealing to very cultivated tastes — highbrow literature, a highbrow film, too highbrow for a Saturday night.
It is rarely a straight compliment. Used approvingly it means serious and demanding; used otherwise, and that is more often, it means pretentious and hard work. The word sits in a set with lowbrow, meaning popular and undemanding, and middlebrow, which is the most damning of the three because it means neither one thing nor the other. All three come from a nineteenth-century pseudoscience that claimed to read intelligence from the height of the forehead, which is worth knowing before using them.
1adjectivehighbrowAppealing to cultivated or intellectual tastes.
“The radio station plays highbrow programmes about philosophy and classical music.”
synonyms: intellectual, cerebral
2nountastesSomebody with such tastes.
“It was written by highbrows for highbrows.”
highbrow is a level of cultural taste.
A compound of the words high + brow, first recorded usage in 1875. Referring to the (by that time discredited) science of phrenology, which suggested that a person of intelligence and sophistication would possess a higher brow-line than someone of lesser intelligence and sophistication.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Music, Art & Culture, News & Communication