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''rustic'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260125123911-00-⌔

rustic - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

rustic (comparative more rustic, superlative most rustic)

  • Country -styled or pastoral; rural.
    • ✤ * rustic country where the sheep and cattle roamed freely*
    • ✤ She had a rustic, woodland air.1
    • 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.2
    • ✤ To this mingling of cultivated and rustic society may also be attributed the rural feeling that runs through British literature.3
  • Unfinished or roughly finished.
    • ✤ * rustic manners*
  • Crude, rough.
  • Simple; artless; unaffected.
    • ✤ *the manners not too polite nor too rustic *4
    • ✤ 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.5

Noun

rustic (plural rustics)

  • A rural person.
    • ✤ 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.6
    • ✤ 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.7
  • (derogatory) An unsophisticated or uncultured person.
    • ✤ Synonyms: see Thesaurus: country bumpkin
    • ✤ Thus this ignorant, unsophisticated but resolute agriculturist captured me. So early in 1917, we left Calcutta for Champaran, looking just like fellow rustics.8
  • (entomology) A noctuoid moth.
  • (entomology) Any of various nymphalid butterflies having brown and orange wings, especially Cupha erymanthis.

Etymology

From Latin rūsticus. Doublet of roister.

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ˈɹʌstɪk/
  • Audio (UK): 🔊
  • Audio (US): 🔊
  • Audio (Australian): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ʌstɪk

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1800, William Wordsworth, We are Seven: ↩

  2. 1816 June – 1817 April/May (date written), [Mary Shelley], chapter I, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. […], volume, London: […] [Macdonald and Son] for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, published 1 January 1818, →OCLC: ↩

  3. 1820, Washington Irving, Rural Life in England in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon: ↩

  4. 1704, Alexander Pope, A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry: ↩

  5. 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: ↩

  6. 1901, Edmund Selous, Bird Watching, p. 226: ↩

  7. 1905–1906, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter IX, in Sir Nigel, London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], published January 1906, →OCLC: ↩

  8. 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, Ahmedabad, Gujarat: Navajivan Press, →OCLC: ↩

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