RAMBUNCTIOUS

Uncontrollably exuberant or boisterous.

This is another of those irrepressibly energetic words that came out of the US in the first half of the nineteenth century, one that is still around. It’s first recorded in a newspaper report in Boston in 1830: “If they are ‘rumbunctious’ at the prospect, they will be ‘riprorious’ when they get a taste.” (Riproarious was another bright-eyed and bushy-tailed coinage, also first recorded that year, with roughly the same meaning.)

Cautious dictionaries say “of unknown origin”, an open invitation to strange and inventive suggestions. One such holds that it is a compound of ram (to butt or strike) with bust (to thrash or beat), with the implication that rambunctious individuals went around ramming and busting people. Please don’t pass this on.

A little burrowing in the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it has been borrowed from one or other of two earlier words. One of them is rumbustious, recorded from 1778. The other is robustious, an ancient adjective meaning both “robust” and “boisterous”, of which the OED entry, published in 1909, comments that it was “In common use during the 17th century. In the 18th it becomes rare, and is described by Johnson (1755) as ‘now only used in low language, and in a sense of contempt’. During the 19th it has been considerably revived, especially by archaizing writers.” At the time, the editors of the OED thought that both words came from robust.

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