英和和英

名詞

unhumanity (uncountable)

1. The quality of being other than human.
   • 1907, Robert Kennedy Duncan, The chemistry of commerce:

     We see, too, that the disaster of which the world actually stood in imminent deadly peril has been averted, and that if every pound of saltpetre in the mines of Chili were suddenly to dissolve into its elements, the human race would still be able to guard itself against the unhumanity of nature.

   • 2004, Neal Asher, The Line of Polity, ISBN 1743037295:

     This one's unhumanity was mostly concealed by his hotsuit, until he moved legs that were hinged the wrong way -- birdlike.

   • 2011, C.L. Moore, Northwest of Earth, ISBN 0575119365:

     No mansmell of smoke or byre or farmstead tainted it, blowing clear across miles beyond miles of wastelands. Smith's nostrils quivered to that scent of unhumanity.

2. (nonstandard) Lack of humaneness; inhumanity.
   • 1894, Sanda, Appointed: An American Novel, page 299:

     Instead of conflict there is murder and massacre — relics of brute savagery and man's unhumanity.

   • 1978, Laxmi Parasuram, Virginia Woolf: The Emerging Reality, page 151:

     McConnell's evidence for this controversial interpretation seems to be based mainly on a consciousness of an unhumanity which the final triumph of impersonal perception implies. As more positive proof of this unhumanity, he refers to the death among the trees — the figure of a man with his throat cut which haunts the sensitive imagination of Neville all through his life, and which vouches for the presence of pointless cruelty and suffering in the book.

   • 2003, Walter Sullivan, The War the Women Lived, ISBN 1566635136:

     Was it any wonder that their habitual indifference to suffering gave way, and the soldiers cursed loud and deep at a causeless unhumanity, which, if practiced habitually, is worse than savage!