dorp, noun

/dɔːp/, /dɔrp/
Forms:
Also with initial capital.
Origin:
Dutch
a. A country town or village; sometimes derogatory, denoting a backward or unprogressive place; dorpie. Also attributive, and figurative.
1802 Truter & Somerville in G.M. Theal Rec. of Cape Col. (1899) IV. 404He had been with the well known Cornelis Kok on a journey through the dorp Patania and Litakoe to the Barrolow nation.
1835 A. Steedman Wanderings I. 103Beaufort..generally presents a scene of activity, arising from the number of farmers, who on various accounts have frequent occasion to visit the Dorp.
1853 Friend 17 Sept.New dorp — Van Wyk’s Vley. The sale of Erven formerly advertised will positively be held on 19th October 1853 at Van Wyk’s Vley.
1878 H.A. Roche On Trek in TvlWe will fancy the ‘Dorp,’ or town where the ceremony is to be performed by their Dutch minister, or Predikant, to be Pretoria.
1898 J.F. Ingram Story of Afr. City 49By degrees the straggling Dorp began to assume shape, and the long open spaces of veldt..were built up or fenced off yard by yard.
1911 P. Gibbon Margaret Harding 134It was a small, stagnant veld dorp, in fact, one of hundreds that are littered over the face of the Colony, and have for their districts a more than metropolitan importance.
1920 Contemp. Rev. (U.K.) Feb. 197In the dorps and the backveld, society, business, religion and politics are closely interwoven.
1938 Rand Daily Mail 27 June 3If the chemists had not discovered how to extract low-grade ore cheaply..Johannesburg, instead of being a great vital city, would have been a dying, derelict dorp.
1948 H.V. Morton In Search of S. Afr. 248If you want to find out what pettymindedness is,..just come and live in a dorp like this.
1960 C. Hooper Brief Authority 25For most of my life I had dreaded the vacuous, depopulated, waste regions of South Africa, with their dreary little dorps, their occasional windmills, their dusty aridity, their ox-wagon mentality.
1966 I. Vaughan These Were my Yesterdays 92If you go on living in a small country dorp your girls will grow up like pumpkins with no advantages.
1973 Weekend Argus 21 Apr. 5I was depressed by the desperate ordinariness..of the average South African town or village. They really are just ‘dorps’ with everything the word connotes — one uninspiring main street in which filling station, hotel, church..intermingle with stereotyped shops and ‘kafees’.
1984 L. Simpson in Style July 109In South Africa the small hotels, the Centrals and Royals have always formed part of..dorp living.
1986 R. Ballen Dorps 1What distinguishes these dorps from American or European villages is the sense of Africa and the presence of black people in these villages.
1991 F.G. Butler Local Habitation 170As Professor Geoff Durrant remarked..: ‘White South Africans all know each other, or of each other. It’s an intellectual dorp.’
1992 E. De Waal in Church Times 13 Mar. 8We stop off at small dorps, towns where there may be no more than two or three streets dominated by a huge, white-painted Dutch Reformed Church.
b. With distinguishing epithet:
||onderdorp [Afrikaans, onder lower], Blikkiesdorp sense 2;
outdorp nonce, a small satellite village.
1970 E. Stuart Informant, Pinetown, KwaZulu-NatalThe children from the onderdorp were a poorly dressed, ill-fed group, yet they seemed cheerful enough.
1914 L.H. Brinkman Breath of Karroo 264The mournful aspect that the little town of Victoria West presented for days after the flood still survives in the memories of the inhabitants...Almost every minister in the vicinity of each outdorp desired to take part in the funeral service.
A country town or village; sometimes derogatory, denoting a backward or unprogressive place; dorpie. Also attributive, and figurative.
Derivatives:
Hence dorpdom  noun, the state of being a dorp; dorpenaar  noun /ˈdɔːpənɑː/, /ˈdɔrpənɑːr/ [Afrikaans, -enaar suffix denoting ‘an inhabitant of (a place)’], an inhabitant of a country village.
1928 J.S. Franklin This Union (1949) 121It is within the power of the ratepayers to decide and determine whether Bloemfontein is to go back to the humdrum existence of ‘dorpdom’ or..play a big and important part in the development of..this great sub-continent of ours.
1955 L.G. Green Karoo 81They still share many familiar scenes...Sheep in the market square..above all, the streams of dorpenaars seeking relief in the streets at night from the heat.
1982 J. Krige in Staffrider Vol.5 No.2, 20If you slide your feet like this then you can’t stand on top of one, you dumb dorpenaar, and they all laughed.
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18021992

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dorpdom
dorpenaar
onderdorp
outdorp

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derogatory or offensive
figurative or allusive
Dormer, nounn.Dorper, nounn.2
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