The story
From The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent by Washington Irving (1819).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Rip Van Winkle
Today it means: A Dutch-American villager who falls asleep for 20 years and wakes up to a changed world, having missed the American Revolution; (by extension) someone or something stuck in the past. Full definition →