Entry · catalog no. 1102
peckerwood
/ /ˈpɛk.ər.wʊd/ /PEK-er-wood
noun · The South · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
A white person, especially a poor or rural white Southerner. Sometimes shortened to 'peck.'
“The old folks called them peckerwoods and kept it moving.”
Origin & Attribution
A Black Southern coinage, inverting "woodpecker" — a bit of linguistic camouflage that let speakers name white people in earshot without being understood. In Black folklore the red-headed woodpecker stood for white people, the blackbird for Black people. In use for white people by the mid-1800s, common by the early 1900s; "peck" clipped from it by the 1920s. (Later taken up separately by white prison gangs.)
1830s
'Peckerwood' as inversion of 'woodpecker'
1859
Applied to white people in print
1920s
Clipped form 'peck' in Black speech
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
The South · 1900s
Spoken by
Southern Black speakers
$PECKERThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading167 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1859
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Green's Dictionary of Slang / OED, "peckerwood" — reference · 1859
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston, Southern folklore fieldwork (woodpecker symbolism) — scholarship · 1935
submitted
See also