Adjective

1. country-styled or pastoral; rural
2. unfinished or roughly finished work
3. crude, rough

   rustic country where the sheep and cattle roamed freely

Quotations

• 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.

Quotations

• 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.