Highbrow and Lowbrow Come From a Discredited Science
A brow is the forehead or the ridge above the eye. Two common words built on it came from measuring skulls.
A brow is the forehead, or the ridge of hair above the eye. *Highbrow* and *lowbrow* come from phrenology, the nineteenth-century belief that skull shape revealed intelligence: a high forehead was supposed to mean a large, refined brain. The science was nonsense but the vocabulary stuck, and *middlebrow* was coined later to complete the set. The *brow of a hill* is the same word, the projecting upper edge.
- The forehead. *A furrowed brow.*
- The eyebrow. *Raised brows.*
- The top of a hill. *The brow of the hill.*
- Highbrow — intellectual. *Highbrow taste.*
- Old English — *bru*. *The source.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | brow | A brow. |
| Plural | brows | Brows. |
| Compound | eyebrow | An eyebrow. |
| Compound | highbrow | Highbrow. |
| Compound | lowbrow | Lowbrow. |
- He wiped his brow.Forehead.
- She raised an eyebrow.Gesture.
- The words come from phrenology.History.
The brow scale
- Highbrow — 1880s, intellectually demanding
- Lowbrow — 1900s, popular and undemanding
- Middlebrow — 1920s, coined to fill the gap
- Phrenology — the discredited source of the metaphor
- None of the three carries any real anatomical meaning
Old English *bru*, an eyebrow or eyelash, of Germanic origin.
Where do highbrow and lowbrow come from?
From phrenology, which wrongly held that a high forehead indicated a large and refined brain. The theory failed but the words remained.
Is the brow of a hill the same word?
Yes. It uses the same image of a projecting upper edge.