rustic

English

WOTD – 4 June 2006

rustic (comparative more rustic, superlative most rustic)

Country-styled or pastoral; rural.
- William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
  She had a rustic, woodland air.
Unfinished or roughly finished.
rustic manners
Crude, rough.
rustic country where the sheep and cattle roamed freely
Simple; artless; unaffected.
- (Can we find and add a quotation of Alexander Pope to this entry?)
- 1898, Winston Churchill, chapter 8, in The Celebrity:
  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.

				17??	1818 1820
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

late 1700s — Robert Burns, Behold, My Love, How Green the Groves
The Princely revel may survey
Our rustic dance wi' scorn.
1818 — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus Ch. I
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.

country-styled

Arabic: رَيْفِيّ‎‎ m (rayfiyy)
Catalan: rústic
Chinese:
Mandarin: please add this translation if you can
Dutch: landelijk (nl)
Esperanto: please add this translation if you can
Finnish: rustiikki (fi), maaseutumainen (fi), maalaismainen (fi), talonpoikainen
German: rustikal (de)
Italian: rustico (it), agreste (it)

unfinished, roughly finished

crude, rough

rustic (plural rustics)

A (sometimes unsophisticated) person from a rural area.
- 1906 — Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Nigel, Ch IX
  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.
- 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.

person from a rural area

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