rustic

WOTD - 4 June 2006

[edit] English

rustic

country-styled

unfinished, roughly finished

crude, rough

				17??	1818 1820
ME: [[{{{enm}}}]] «	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.

Singular
rustic

Plural
rustics

rustic (plural rustics)

						1906 1927
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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.