RUFFIAN • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Ruffian

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noun

Ruffian n.

A pimp; a pander; also, a paramour. (Obs.) "He (her husband) is no sooner abroad than she is instantly at home, reveling with her ruffians."

A boisterous, cruel, brutal fellow; a desperate fellow ready for murderous or cruel deeds; a cutthroat. "Wilt thou on thy deathbed play the ruffian?"

Hence: A tough, lawless or bullying person.

verb

Ruffian v. i. To play the ruffian; to rage; to raise tumult. (R.)

adjective

Ruffian adj. Brutal; cruel; savagely boisterous; murderous; as, ruffian rage.

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Etymology of 'Ruffian'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Ruffian" Quotes from Famous Books

... doubtful. Clement, who by his pennywise parsimony had left himself defenceless, made a feeble and wholly vain attempt to put the city in a state of defence. The corrupt and cowardly citizens could not have opposed any valid resistance to the ruffian hordes who were slowly but surely, like an advancing conflagration, coming upon them, even if they had been willing to do their best. But the trembling Pope's appeal to them to defend the walls fell on the ears of as sorely trembling ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... I'll attend to yours and mine, too. I'm not going to have that ruffian ogling you, I know who ...

— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.

... it was Scott who called into life the Vigilance Committee which expatriated York's friend, Jack Hamlin; it was York who created the "Sandy Bar Herald," which characterized the act as "a lawless outrage," and Scott as a "Border Ruffian"; it was Scott, at the head of twenty masked men, who, one moonlight night, threw the offending "forms" into the yellow river, and scattered the types in the dusty road. These proceedings were received in ...

— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... the real cause of the Duke Hamilton's death—a paltry quarrel that might easily have been made up, and with a ruffian so low, base, profligate, and degraded with former crimes and repeated murders, that a man of such a renown and princely rank as my lord duke might have disdained to sully his sword with the blood of such a villain. But his ...

— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... just related were transpiring, and at the very hour when Mr. Mandeville was consulting the man of law, Duffel was engaged with his two ruffian associates in a plot of villainy, which, for deep cunning and calculation, was superior to anything he had yet conceived and carried out, though it was but a link in the chain of criminal acts he had forged out and was about to follow up. The two held their consultation ...

— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison

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