rustic - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From Latin rūsticus. Doublet of roister.

rustic (comparative more rustic, superlative most rustic)

  1. Country-styled or pastoral; rural.
    rustic country where the sheep and cattle roamed freely
    • late 1700s, Robert Burns, Behold, My Love, How Green the Groves
      The Princely revel may survey
      Our rustic dance wi' scorn.
    • 1816 June – 1817 April/May (date written), [Mary Shelley], chapter I, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] [Macdonald and Son] for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, published 1 January 1818, →OCLC:
      With his permission my mother prevailed on her rustic guardians to yield their charge to her. They were fond of the sweet orphan. Her presence had seemed a blessing to them, but it would be unfair to her to keep her in poverty and want when Providence afforded her such powerful protection.
  2. Unfinished or roughly finished.
    rustic manners
  3. Crude, rough.
  4. Simple; artless; unaffected.
    • 1704, Alexander Pope, A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry:
      the manners not too polite nor too rustic
    • 1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter VIII, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC:
      Now we plunged into a deep shade with the boughs lacing each other overhead, and crossed dainty, rustic bridges over the cold trout-streams, the boards giving back the clatter of our horses' feet: or anon we shot into a clearing, with a colored glimpse of the lake and its curving shore far below us.

country-styled

crude, rough

rustic (plural rustics)

  1. A rural person.
    • 1901, Edmund Selous, Bird Watching, p. 226:
      The cause of these stampedes was generally undiscoverable; but sometimes, when the birds stayed some time down on the water, the figure of a rustic would at length appear, walking behind a hedge, along a path bounding the little meadow.
    • 1905–1906, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter IX, in Sir Nigel, London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], published January 1906, →OCLC:
      The King looked at the motionless figure, at the little crowd of hushed expectant rustics beyond the bridge, and finally at the face of Chandos, which shone with amusement.
  2. (derogatory) An unsophisticated or uncultured person.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:country bumpkin
  3. (entomology) A noctuoid moth.
  4. (entomology) Any of various nymphalid butterflies having brown and orange wings, especially Cupha erymanthis.

person from a rural area

Cupha erymanthis

Borrowed from French rustique, from Latin rusticus.

rustic m or n (feminine singular rustică, masculine plural rustici, feminine/neuter plural rustice)

  1. rustic