rustic

• (obsolete) rustick, rusticke, rustique

From Latin rūsticus.

• IPA^(key): /ˈɹʌstɪk/

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• Rhymes: -ʌstɪk

rustic (comparative more rustic, superlative most rustic)

1. Country-styled or pastoral; rural.
   • (Can we date this quote?) William Wordsworth

     She had a rustic, woodland air.

2. Unfinished or roughly finished.

   rustic manners

3. Crude, rough.

   rustic country where the sheep and cattle roamed freely

4. 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.

• 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.

• rustic moth
• rustic work
• rusticity

rustic (plural rustics)

1. A (sometimes unsophisticated) person from a rural area.
   • 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, 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.

• Curtis, citrus, rictus