rude [ME] Many a schoolchild has sniggered at old books or hymns that mention ‘rude dwellings’. Especially for children, the dominant sense of rude is now ‘referring to a subject such as sex in an embarrassing or offensive way’, yet this is a recent development, being recorded only from the early 1910s, a development of an old sense ‘bad-mannered, rough’. The word came via Old French from Latin rudis, ‘unfinished, roughly made, uncultivated’, and in medieval times meant ‘uneducated, ignorant, uncultivated’, and ‘roughly made’ as well as ‘impolite’. See also mechanical. In Jamaica a rude boy is a poor, lawless urban youth [1960s].