Green’s Dictionary of Slang

boisterous, noisy, unruly, turbulent.

1776		Foote A Trip to Calais in Works (1799) II 339: The sea has been rather rumbustious, I own.
1811		Lex. Balatronicum.
1827		J. Wight More Mornings in Bow St. 202: The tailors are really becoming the most rumbistical part of mankind. Out of every ten disorderlies brought to this office you shall have at least nine tailors.
1837		Bucks Gaz. 26 Aug. 1/7: She seemed depressed [...] what with the rain and the rumbustical demeanour of ‘the masses’.
1845		R.S. Surtees Hillingdon Hall I 34: All the rumbustical apologies for great coats that have inundated the town of late years.
1850		F.E. Smedley Frank Fairlegh (1878) 98: He boldly inquired whether [... ] ‘I had not been a-exhaling laughing gas, or any sich rum-bustical wegitable?’.
1851		Lytton My Novel (1884–5) II Bk XI 395: As for that black-whiskered alligator, the Baron, let me first get out of those rambustious, un-christian, filbert-shaped claws of his.
1859, 1860		Hotten Dict. of Modern Sl. etc.
1866		Letters by an Odd Boy 165: Uncle Sam [U. S.] has sent us several cargoes of slang terms more or less familiar: a ‘splendiferous slantindicular rumbustious,’ dialect calculated to ‘raise the dander,’ ‘put in an awful fix,’ ‘catawampously exflunctify,’ cause to ‘cave in,’ ‘absquatulate,’ and ‘slope,’ the ‘stranger’ to whom it may be addressed.
1873		Sl. Dict.
1875		Eddowe’s Jrnl for Shropshire 14 Apr. 2/3: The Parliament train [...] It’s Driver’s a man who in fight is no joker, / And he’ll quickly suppress this rumbistical Stoker.
1881		Bulletin (Sydney) 15 Jan. 3/4: Two or three nobblers are said to render the doctor a lunatic, and when he got on a ‘bust,’ on rum, he was particularly rum-bustical.
1885		‘George Eliot’ Letters and Jrnls 168: All those monstrous, ‘rombustical’ beasts with their horns — the horn with eyes and a mouth speaking proud things.
1892		Brooklyn Dly Eagle (NY) 4 Dec. 3/7: ‘Wot’s makin’ you all so dead rambunctious to-night, anyhow?’.
1896		G.F. Northall Warwickshire Word-Book 196: Rumbustical. Boisterous, obstreperous.
1899		‘Pot’ & ‘Swears’ Scarlet City 56: What do you mean by coming in’ere in this rumbusticle way?
1903		Arizona republican (Phoenix, AZ) 6 July 3/6: Young men [...] refuse it [i.e champagne] for the sole reason that there is a suggestion of a rumbustious ‘past’.
1936		Mencken Amer. Lang. (4th edn) 568: Most of these, of course, had their brief days and then disappeared, but there were others that got into the common vocabulary and still survive, e.g., blizzard [...] and rambunctious, the last-named the final step in a process which began with robustious and ran through rumbustious and rambustious in England before Americans took a hand in it.
1978		M. Mahy ‘Librarian and the Robbers’ in Drever Teaching English in Primary Classrooms (1999) 125: We used to sit around our campfire singing rombustical songs and indulging in rough humour, but they’ve lost their taste for it.
2002		(con. 1932-3) D. Frith Bodyline Autopsy 47: Eleven years earlier the rumbustious Tennyson [...] had made gallant runs against Australia’s fiery Gregory and McDonald.