Word.ws English Dictionary

Ruritanian

UK/ˌɹʊə.ɹɪˈteɪ.ni.ən//ˌɹʊɹ.ɪˈteɪ.ni.ən/

Ruritanian adjective: of or having the characteristics of adventure, romance, and intrigue, as in works of romantic fiction.

Adjective

Ruritanian (comparative more Ruritanian, superlative most Ruritanian)

  1. Of or having the characteristics of adventure, romance, and intrigue, as in works of romantic fiction.
    • He [Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau] had, it is true, indulged in a sort of Ruritanian flirtation with the queen, seen her secretly, pronounced her very solemnly the "only man" about the king, and made rather a fool of himself in that matter, but his schemes were drawn upon a much larger...1919 November – 1920 November, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “The New Democratic Republics of America and France”, in The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind […], volume II...
    • These claims were called the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent Ruritanian. But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad. So holding this finest flower of the Ruritanian genius, as their poet laureate said...1922, Walter Lippman, chapter X, in Public Opinion, published 2007, page 79
  2. Used to describe a fictitious and generic foreign government or person, used to state a general or hypothetical situation.
    • In practice, the Ruritanian regime is autocratic, controlling business, government, finance, and military posts.1968, Robert Ellsworth Elder, The Information Machine, page 339

Noun

Ruritanian (plural Ruritanians)

  1. A person from the fictional land of Ruritania.

Forms of Ruritanian

Adjective
comparativemore Ruritanian
superlativemost Ruritanian
Noun
pluralRuritanians

Origin of Ruritanian

From Ruritania + -an, after the fictional kingdom used as the setting for stories by Anthony Hope (1863–1933).

Questions about Ruritanian

What does Ruritanian mean?
Ruritanian means of or having the characteristics of adventure, romance, and intrigue, as in works of romantic fiction.
What part of speech is Ruritanian?
Ruritanian can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce Ruritanian?
Ruritanian is pronounced /ˌɹʊə.ɹɪˈteɪ.ni.ən/ (UK).

Words near Ruritanian in the dictionary

  1. rurigenous
  2. Rurika
  3. Rurikid
  4. Rurikids
  5. Ruritania
  6. Ruritanian
  7. Ruritanians
  8. rurn
  9. rurned
  10. rurnt
  11. ruroid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Ruritanian (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: “Ruritanian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ruritanian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.