rustic

• (obsolete) rustick, rusticke, rustique

From Latin rūsticus. Doublet of roister.

• IPA^(key): /ˈɹʌstɪk/

• Audio (UK)

  (file)

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ʌstɪk

rustic (comparative more rustic, superlative most rustic)

1. Country-styled or pastoral; rural.
   • 1800, William Wordsworth, We are Seven:

     She had a rustic, woodland air.

   • late 1700s, Robert Burns, Behold, My Love, How Green the Groves

     The Princely revel may survey
     Our rustic dance wi' scorn.

   • 1818, [Mary Shelley], chapter I, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] [Macdonald and Son] for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, →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.

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

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

2. Unfinished or roughly finished.

   rustic manners

3. Crude, rough.

   rustic country where the sheep and cattle roamed freely

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.

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.

   • 1906, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter IX, in Sir Nigel:

     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. an unsophisticated or uncultured person
   • 1927-29, Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of my Experiments with Truth, Part V, The Stain of Indigo, translated 1940 by Mahadev Desai

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

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

• Citrus, Curtis, Turcis, citrus, rictus

Borrowed from French rustique, from Latin rusticus.

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

1. rustic