peckerwood
/ˈpɛkɚwʊd/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.52 in modern English
22
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
noun
A white person, especially a Southerner, or one who is ignorant, rustic, or bigoted.
American usage; Offensive; Slang
Example Sentences
- "On the morning of the next, one of Mr. White's daughters came into the house to inform me that there was a "peckerwood" in a tree in the yard. I immediately took my gun and went out to investigate thinking that perhaps it was a Pileolated Woodpecker, a bird I wanted to obtain."
- "When I was a boy, I rooted over an old dead sourwood to get some peckerwood eggs."
- "There was nothing but a peckerwood on an oak tree."
- "Throughout this territory are mills of every variety and size, from the small "peckerwood" tractor mill capable of cutting only a few thousand feet of lumber per day to the world's largest pine lumber mill with a capacity of more than one million feet per day."
- "The Langdale Company's new centralized sawmill and debarker in 1958 constituted a tremendous advance over the old peckerwood technology."
- "All the time I was stretched out on the infirmary cot I kept looking at the blank walls and seeing the mean, murdering faces of those Southern peckerwoods when they went after Big Six and the others with their knives."
Etymology
Inversion of woodpecker. Application to white people is due to the perception that the woodpecker is a symbol of whites, whereas the crow or blackbird is a symbol of blacks.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈpɛkɚwʊd/
- British English: /ˈpɛkəwʊd/