Word.ws English Dictionary

rudeboy

rudeboy noun: a male juvenile delinquent, originally in Jamaica in the 1960s.

Noun

rudeboy (plural rudeboys)

  1. A male juvenile delinquent, originally in Jamaica in the 1960s.
    • Leppo had been a rudeboy since his teens, earning his first three-month jail rap for vagrancy in 1971.2000, Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley
    • I still use the word rudeboy cos it’s been round for longer. People’re always tryin to stick a label on our scene. That’s the problem with havin a fuckin scene. First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, Britasians, fuckin Indobrits.2006, Gautam Malkani, Londonstani, HarperCollins, →ISBN, page 5
    Synonyms:
    Rudy
  2. A male enthusiast of ska music.
    • "I swear I've watched as much MTV Base an Juggy D videos as they have, but I still can't attain the right level a rudeboy finesse," bemoans Jas.2007, Dohra Ahmad, Rotten English: A Literary Anthology
    • The rudeboy might have evolved since his ska-fuelled early days on the streets of 1960s Jamaica, but the staples are the same: nicely buffed footwear, pork-pie hats, cropped trousers and sharp suits.2015 September 11, Martell Campbell & Donya Campbell, “Sharp and natty: the baddest rudeboys on the street today – in pictures”, in The Guardian

Examples of rudeboy in a sentence

  • Since I was a teenager I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school.2016 September 15, Riz Ahmed, “Typecast as a terrorist”, in The Guardian:
  • From tennis nuts to Jamaican rudeboys, skinheads, mods, ska-punks, indie kids and Camden popstars, all have done the Perry polo before Proud Boys came along.2020 October 4, Nosheen Iqbal, “Fashion … or fascist? The long tussle over that Fred Perry logo”, in The Observer, →ISSN:

Synonyms of rudeboy

Forms of rudeboy

pluralrudeboys
alternative formrude boy

Origin of rudeboy

Borrowed from Jamaican Creole rude bwoy, equivalent to rude + boy.

Words formed from rudeboy

Questions about rudeboy

What does rudeboy mean?
Rudeboy means a male juvenile delinquent, originally in Jamaica in the 1960s.
How do you use rudeboy in a sentence?
Since I was a teenager I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school.
What part of speech is rudeboy?
Rudeboy is a noun.
What is the plural of rudeboy?
The plural of rudeboy is rudeboys.

Words near rudeboy in the dictionary

  1. rude
  2. rude awakening
  3. rude awakenings
  4. rude boy
  5. rude boys
  6. rudeboy
  7. rudeboys
  8. rudefem
  9. rudefems
  10. rudeful
  11. rudegirl

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rudeboy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “rudeboy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rudeboy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.