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Definition
unsophisticated (meant disapprovingly to refer to old-fashioned or narrow-minded attitudes and ideas)Provincial can also mean "related to a province" or "related to the provinces." Its more literary meaning of unsophisticated originated as a pejorative term for ideas held in the provinces that were considered old-fashioned or uninformed by many who lived in the capital city.
- In that well-traveled company I felt uncomfortably provincial.
provincial = unsophisticated (meant disapprovingly—often to refer to old-fashioned or narrow-minded attitudes and ideas)
- narrow provincial attitudes
- Without consideration, he dismissed her ideas as provincial.
- To the urbane, such a view sometimes sounds embarrassingly provincial.Nicholas Eberstadt -- Starved for Ideas -- http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.7134/pub_detail.asp (retrieved 06/29/06)
- In the years since, ... educational thinkers have unapologetically called for schooling to free students from the yoke of their family's provincial understandings.Frederick M. Hess -- What Is a "Public School"? -- http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.19900/pub_detail.asp (retrieved 06/29/06)
- I shrank my own life. ... I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity.Peter Shaffer -- Equus
- Native San Franciscans, possessive of the city, had to cope with an influx, not of awed respectful tourists but of raucous unsophisticated provincials.Maya Angelou -- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.H.G. Wells -- The Invisible Man
- with two Provincial roses on my razed shoesWilliam Shakespeare -- Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
- His clothes were too heavy and provincial.Sinclair Lewis -- Main Street
- An idiot in tight pants; oppressed by that prig of a husband; typically provincial and judgmental of everyone.Alice Sebold -- The Lovely Bones
- Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed, the illusions lost there.Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary
- New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all.Henry David Thoreau -- Walden
- I am but a poor provincial gentleman, who removeth his shoes before entering the dwellings of the learned.Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- ...to correct Henry's provincial manners and speech and clothing.William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!
- Scold me all you like for a provincial ninny, you have no such actresses in Spain.Thornton Wilder -- The Bridge of San Luis Rey
- It was as if we were a provincial audience,Susanna Kaysen -- Girl Interrupted
- Her parents seemed to fall back in love and even her totally provincial brother learned both Icelandic and French.Sara Shepard -- Pretty Little Liars
- Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea.Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Letter from a Birmingham Jail
- He was one of Herat's best-connected men, friend of the mayor and the provincial governor.Khaled Hosseini -- A Thousand Splendid Suns
provincial = unsophisticated
provincials = people thought to be unsophisticated because they are not from a large city
provincial = unsophisticated
provincial = unsophisticated
provincial = unsophisticated
provincial = unsophisticated with old-fashioned or narrow-minded attitudes and ideas
provincial = unsophisticated
provincial = unsophisticated
provincial = unsophisticated (from the provinces rather than the capital city)
provincial = unsophisticated
provincial = unsophisticated (meant disapprovingly to refer to old-fashioned or narrow-minded attitudes and ideas)
provincial = unsophisticated
provincial = unsophisticated
provincial = unsophisticated (narrow-minded and/or old-fashioned)
provincial = of the province (a region within a country much like a state is a region in the United States)