Ruritanian

comparative more Ruritanian · superlative most Ruritanian

1. Of or having the characteristics of adventure, romance, and intrigue, as in works of romantic fiction.

   2 more examples

   He [Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau] had, it is true, indulged in a sort of Ruritanian flirtation with the queen, seen her secretly, pronounced her very solemnly the "only man" about the king, and made rather a fool of himself in that matter, but his schemes were drawn upon a much larger scale than the scale of the back stairs of the Tuileries.

   1919 November – 1920 November, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “The New Democratic Republics of America and France”, in The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind […], volume II, London: George Newnes […], published November 1920, →OCLC, § 10, page 601, column 1

   These claims were called the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent Ruritanian. But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad. So holding this finest flower of the Ruritanian genius, as their poet laureate said, to their hearts, Ruritania's statesmen went forth to divide and conquer.

   1922, Walter Lippman, chapter X, in Public Opinion, published 2007, page 79

2. Used to describe a fictitious and generic foreign government or person, used to state a general or hypothetical situation.

   In practice, the Ruritanian regime is autocratic, controlling business, government, finance, and military posts.

   1968, Robert Ellsworth Elder, The Information Machine, page 339

plural Ruritanians

1. A person from the fictional land of Ruritania.