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What is "rumbustious"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
rumbustious
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A plant can be an obedient herb in one habitat and a rumbustious weed somewhere else.
▪ In a playing career that ended the month Graeme Souness arrived at Rangers, Johnstone had excelled himself as a rumbustious centre-forward.
▪ They are painted with a rumbustious panache-or, looked at another way, with a gauche lack of sophistication.
▪ This is a noisy, rumbustious film that's prone to burying itself in hails of gunshots and sheets of flame.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
rumbustious

1778, an arbitrary formation, part of what Farmer describes as "A class of colloquialisms compounded with an intensive prefix" (ram- or rum-), probably suggesting in part rum (adj.) in its old slang sense of "good, fine," and ramp (n.2). In this case apparently suggested by boisterous, robustious, bumptious, etc. Coined about the same time were rumbustical, rambumptious "conceited, self-assertive," ramgumptious "shrewd, bold, rash," rambuskious "rough," rumstrugenous. Also compare ramshackle, rambunctious.\n\n

Wiktionary
rumbustious

a. (context informal chiefly British English) boisterous and unruly

WordNet
rumbustious

adj. noisy and lacking in restraint or discipline; "a boisterous crowd"; "a social gathering that became rambunctious and out of hand"; "a robustious group of teenagers"; "beneath the rumbustious surface of his paintings is sympathy for the vulnerability of ordinary human beings"; "an unruly class" [syn: boisterous, rambunctious, robustious, unruly]

Usage examples of "rumbustious".

It had been bought and brought to greatness in the fifties by a rumbustious tycoon thrown up atypically from prudent banking stock.

The second small blot in the clear sky was an urchin with a broken head, who admitted, between sniffs and sobs, that he and a few more of his age had been playing a somewhat rumbustious ball game against the wall of the priests house, a clear, windowless wall well suited for the purpose, and that they had naturally made a certain amount of noise in the process.