INHUMAN

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does inhuman mean? 

• INHUMAN (adjective)
  The adjective INHUMAN has 2 senses:

1. without compunction or human feeling

2. belonging to or resembling something nonhuman

  Familiarity information: INHUMAN used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• INHUMAN (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Without compunction or human feeling

Synonyms:

cold; cold-blooded; inhuman; insensate

Context example:

insensate destruction

Similar:

inhumane (lacking and reflecting lack of pity or compassion)

Derivation:

inhumanity (the quality of lacking compassion or consideration for others)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Belonging to or resembling something nonhuman

Context example:

a babel of inhuman noises

Similar:

nonhuman (not human; not belonging to or produced by or appropriate to human beings)

 Context examples 

Tut, tut! This sounds serious. It would be inhuman not to answer his call.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I was some little way off, so that I could not make out the features, but there was something unnatural and inhuman about the face.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

What inhuman rogues there are in the world!

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Certainly; it would indeed be very impertinent and inhuman in me to trouble you with any inquisitiveness of mine.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

A handful of villainous half-breeds dominated the country, armed such Indians as would support them, and turned the rest into slaves, terrorizing them with the most inhuman tortures in order to force them to gather the india-rubber, which was then floated down the river to Para.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

This speech was immediately published throughout the kingdom; nor did any thing terrify the people so much as those encomiums on his majesty’s mercy; because it was observed, that the more these praises were enlarged and insisted on, the more inhuman was the punishment, and the sufferer more innocent.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

This reticence upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He was amazed, how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I (these were his expressions) could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines; whereof, he said, some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)