Definition of "rustic"

She had a rustic, woodland air.

1800, William Wordsworth, We are Seven

The Princely revel may survey Our rustic dance wi' scorn.

late 1700s, Robert Burns, Behold, My Love, How Green the Groves

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.

1818, [Mary Shelley], chapter I, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] [Macdonald and Son] for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones

To this mingling of cultivated and rustic society may also be attributed the rural feeling that runs through British literature.

1820, Washington Irving, Rural Life in England in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon

the manners not too polite nor too rustic

1704, Alexander Pope, A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry

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.

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.

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.

1901, Edmund Selous, Bird Watching, p. 226

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.

1906, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter IX, in Sir Nigel

Thus this ignorant, unsophisticated but resolute agriculturist captured me. So early in 1917, we left Calcutta for Champaran, looking just like fellow rustics.

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