rustic

comparative more rustic · superlative most rustic · alternative rustick · alternative rusticke · alternative rustique

1. Country-styled or pastoral; rural.

   rustic country where the sheep and cattle roamed freely

   4 more examples

   She had a rustic, woodland air.

   1800, William Wordsworth, We are Seven

   late 1700s, Robert Burns, Behold, My Love, How Green the Groves The Princely revel may survey Our rustic dance wi' scorn.

   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.

   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

   To this mingling of cultivated and rustic society may also be attributed the rural feeling that runs through British literature.

   1820, Washington Irving, Rural Life in England in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon

2. Unfinished or roughly finished.

   rustic manners

3. Crude, rough.
4. Simple; artless; unaffected.

   the manners not too polite nor too rustic

   1704, Alexander Pope, A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry

   1 more example

   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.

   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

plural rustics · alternative rustick · alternative rusticke · alternative rustique

1. A rural person.

   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.

   1905–1906, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter IX, in Sir Nigel, London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], published January 1906, →OCLC

   1 more example

   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.

   1901, Edmund Selous, Bird Watching, p. 226

2. derogatoryAn unsophisticated or uncultured person.

   Thus this ignorant, unsophisticated but resolute agriculturist captured me. So early in 1917, we left Calcutta for Champaran, looking just like fellow rustics.

   1927–1929, M[ohandas] K[aramchand] Gandhi, “The Stain of Indigo”, in The Story of My Experiments with Truth: Translated from the Original in Gujarati, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), Ahmedabad, Gujarat: Navajivan Press, →OCLC

   Synonyms: bogger, bogtrotter, boor, bucolic, bydlo, culchie, carl, churl

3. biologyA noctuoid moth.
4. biologyAny of various nymphalid butterflies having brown and orange wings, especially Cupha erymanthis.