Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Slang An unsophisticated country person.
Wiktionary
- n. A person of rural heritage; a yokel.
- n. pejorative An uninformed, unsophisticated, or unintelligent person.
Etymologies
- Generic use of the name Rube. (Wiktionary)
- Probably from Rube, nickname for Reuben. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Rubingh includes the Dutch word rube, meaning 'peasant.”
“This moronic Neugebauer rube is also a birther … ….”
“* On the Alabama coast one can command more money from some Wisconsin rube than one can expect from a native Mobilian.”
“Washington had the London theater to make him feel like a slack-jawed rube from the provinces; I had cricket.”
“Judd, although he had been called a rube had become a great favorite and very popular at Bartlett.”
“Your rube is a wonder, and that's a fact," he said to me several times.”
“He wanted it known that he did have these connections, that he wasnt some kind of rube out there, back-bencher.”
“And it certainly doesn't help Obama with his "rube" problem, the subtext of so much of the Vice Presidential chatter.”
“Alfred, as all other "rube" amateurs have done and always will do, wanted to engage to give the entire concert.”
“The widow, somewhat disarmed by the good man's homage, admitted that he was a "rube" of some natural talent, a fact that made her tolerate the ridiculous note of his knee breeches.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘rube’.
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Unsavory characters
absconder, aretaloger, arriviste, avaunter, bamboozler, bandit, banger, barbarian, barmecide, barrator, beldam, blatherskite and 190 more...
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Words I loathe
can't, hate, skree, pomp, russel, moist, damned, pure, justified, saved, fulcrum, cooch and 11 more...
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Chennessy's Words
philistine, messianic, dyad, cult, bourgeois, blot, ploy, polyglot, lingua franca, cumbersome, lumber, petit-bourgeois and 446 more...
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Consider the Lobster
By David Foster Wallace
percussive, discursive, lugubrious, docent, assiduously, berm, wag, bonmot, imbroglio, telegraph, fissile, rube and 220 more...
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Nightmare Alley
From the novel by William Lindsay Gresham
geek, mark, rubber, calliope, booze-fool, rummy, the horrors, the crawling snakes, equalizer, bubbies, grubstake, softshoe and 99 more...
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wreckingball's Words
reprehensible, problematize, crepuscular, deleterious, pestilent, strumpet, draggletail, interrobang, meretricious, systematize, schadenfreude, capricious and 443 more...
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Sugarbuzz's Words
buzz, widget, haiku, manifesto, warble, supernova, attenuate, mania, diabolical, behemoth, beguile, lascivious and 106 more...
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Damieng's Words
lupine, sapor, boz imp, imp, ovine, saracen, haberdashery, tiebar, shill, cutler, cutaway, lucite and 218 more...
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msc's Words
pugilist, threepeat, bloviate, palaver, syncreism, pastiche, eschatology, peripatetic, glossolalia, busker, nudnik, troglodyte and 213 more...
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grassdog's Words
schadenfreude, sanguine, nefarious, verisimilitude, antediluvian, salacious, obfuscate, plethora, cacophony, defenestration, vacillate, blasphemy and 478 more...
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2008 Wordlist
Hopefully, I'll be using this site for more than one year. It will be fun then to look back and see what new words I found worthy of notice in any given year.
All words spotted in 2008...longanimity, permalancer, breeder, biodegradable, handicapable, gender-neutral, translator, interpreter, translation, interpreting, kleptocracy, fanfiction and 1598 more...
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Vocabulary
My ever expanding vocabulary...
feuterer, abattoir, kibosh, sequin, shiftless, scrimshanker, sic, moniker, dogsbody, contranym, autoantonym, exhortation and 306 more...
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Words
apoplectic, absolve, accentuate, accost, acrimony, adjudicate, adulate, affront, agrarian, alacrity, ambivalence, ascetic and 120 more...
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MysticGypsy's list
illuminata, ginormous, zephyr, xenagogue, evolution, exploratory, supercalifragilis..., moxie, plethora, sage, transformation, enlightenment and 39 more...
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Terms for People
pundit, puritan, cretin, popinjay, jackanape, schlemiel, diplomat, ambassador, partisan, apostle, disciple, puppet and 71 more...
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boggled
legal according to the dicker we use
shaw, taw, nowt, tew, frit, scow, trow, dow, roan, stipe, shew, woad and 31 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for rube.
yarb '"Where did they go? You know, day after day I stand here - wondering just where do they go!" That's Thurston's gag. By God, I'm going to use it until I see one face - just one - in this bunch of rubes that gets the point. They never do.'
- Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham Jun 29, 2012
bilby "Reason and rationality told him that Stark could not be out there, ramming around like some weird cancer in human form, killing people. As the country rube in Oliver Goldsmith's 'She Stoops To Conquer' was wont to say, it was perfectly unpossible, Diggory."
- 'The Dark Half', Stephen King. Dec 31, 2007
bilby "I’m sure that scene caused gales of laughter in the blue states, because there’s nothing more hilarious than making fun of the Jesus-believing rubes."
- 'Beowulf' review, Michael Karounos, Nov 2007. Nov 30, 2007