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redneck

nounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈɹɛdnɛk//

A poor, rural, usually white, person from the Southern United States or parts of the Midwest and Northeast, especially one whose beliefs are seen as unsophisticated and backward; sometimes with additional connotations of being bigoted.

noun

  1. 1

    slangA poor, rural, usually white, person from the Southern United States or parts of the Midwest and Northeast, especially one whose beliefs are seen as unsophisticated and backward; sometimes with additional connotations of being bigoted.

  2. 2

    yokel, hick, country bumpkin

    Sample a look back you look and find / Nothing but rednecks for 400 years if you check

  3. 3

    historicalAny of the miners who wore red bandanas for identification during the West Virginia mine war of 1921.

  4. 4

    historicalA member of a certain Baltimore street gang, active in 1859.

  5. 5

    archaicA Roman Catholic.

Etymology

Bahuvrīhi compound of red + neck. Compare rooinek. The term originally characterized farmers that had a red neck, caused by sunburn from long hours working in the fields.

Forms

plural
rednecks
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).