different between rustic vs peasantry

English

Alternative forms

• (obsolete) rustick, rusticke, rustique

Etymology

From Latin r?sticus. Doublet of roister.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /???st?k/
• Rhymes: -?st?k

Adjective

rustic (comparative more rustic, superlative most rustic)

1. Country-styled or pastoral; rural.
   • 1800, William Wordsworth, We are Seven

     She had a rustic, woodland air.

   • 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.

2. Unfinished or roughly finished.

3. Crude, rough.

4. Simple; artless; unaffected.
   • 1704, Alexander Pope, A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry

     the manners not too polite nor too rustic

Derived terms

• rustic moth
• rustic work
• rusticity

Translations

Noun

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.

2. A noctuoid moth.
3. Any of various nymphalid butterflies having brown and orange wings, especially Cupha erymanthis.

Translations

Anagrams

• Citrus, Curtis, Turcis, citrus, rictus

Romanian

Etymology

From French rustique, from Latin rusticus.

Adjective

rustic m or n (feminine singular rustic?, masculine plural rustici, feminine and neuter plural rustice)

1. rustic

Declension

English

Etymology

From peasant +? -ry, from Middle English paissaunt.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?p?z?nt?i/
• Hyphenation: peas?ant?ry

Noun

peasantry (countable and uncountable, plural peasantries)

1. (historical) Impoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.
   • 1920, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, Chapter 3.

     They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.

2. Ignorant people of the lowest social status; bumpkins, rustics.
   • 1885, George Eliot, Silas Marner, Chapter 1.

     Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the gray-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity.

Translations