Sample sentences for PROVINCIAL

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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)
But young men didn't — at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn't — drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.
F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The Great Gatsby

provincial = unsophisticated

I shrank my own life. ... I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity.
Peter Shaffer -- Equus

provincial = unsophisticated

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

provincials = people thought to be unsophisticated because they are not from a large city

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

provincial = unsophisticated

with two Provincial roses on my razed shoes
William Shakespeare -- Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

provincial = unsophisticated

His clothes were too heavy and provincial.
Sinclair Lewis -- Main Street

provincial = unsophisticated

An idiot in tight pants; oppressed by that prig of a husband; typically provincial and judgmental of everyone.
Alice Sebold -- The Lovely Bones

provincial = unsophisticated with old-fashioned or narrow-minded attitudes and ideas

Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed, the illusions lost there.
Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary

provincial = unsophisticated

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

provincial = unsophisticated

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

provincial = unsophisticated (from the provinces rather than the capital city)

...to correct Henry's provincial manners and speech and clothing.
William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

provincial = unsophisticated

Scold me all you like for a provincial ninny, you have no such actresses in Spain.
Thornton Wilder -- The Bridge of San Luis Rey

provincial = unsophisticated (meant disapprovingly to refer to old-fashioned or narrow-minded attitudes and ideas)

It was as if we were a provincial audience,
Susanna Kaysen -- Girl Interrupted

provincial = unsophisticated

Her parents seemed to fall back in love and even her totally provincial brother learned both Icelandic and French.
Sara Shepard -- Pretty Little Liars

provincial = unsophisticated

Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea.
Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Letter from a Birmingham Jail

provincial = unsophisticated (narrow-minded and/or old-fashioned)

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