Appalachian English - Sample Vocabulary

Sample Vocabulary

The following is a list of words that occur in the Appalachian dialect. These words are not exclusive to the region, but tend to occur with greater frequency than in other English dialects.

• Afeared: afraid.
• Airish: cool or chilly
• Ary: any
• Bald: n. a treeless mountain summit (See Appalachian balds).
• Ball-hoot: v. to drive recklessly fast on dangerous rural or mountain roads; derived from an old logging term for rolling or skidding logs downhill.
• Blinds: n. window shades or window shutters. While blinds usually refers to window shades, in Appalachia and the greater Midland dialect, it can also refer to window shutters.
• Brickle: brittle.
• Caps: popcorn
• Cat-head: a large biscuit.
• Chancy: doubtful.
• Chaw: chewing tobacco.
• Clean: verb modifier that is used to mean entirely completing an action. Can be used in place of 'all the way', e.g., "He knocked it clean off the table."
• Coke: short for Coca-Cola, but applied to all flavored, carbonated sodas, regardless of brand, flavor or type. Coke is used primarily in the southern half of the dialect region, whereas the more northern-influenced pop receives more usage in Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and most of Southwest Virginia.
• Cornpone: Skillet cornbread made without eggs.
• Counterpane: bedspread.
• Cove: a valley between two ridges.
• Discomfit: v. inconvenience.
• Directly: later, after a while, when it becomes convenient, soon, immediately (largely depending on context).
• Fireboard: Mantel.
• Fit: used in place of the word "fought".
• Fixin':
  • a serving or helping of food. Can I get a fixin' of dumplings?,
  • an event, party or social function where food is served. They're having a fixin' at church next Friday.
  • about to, They're fixin' to get hitched.
• Gaum: n. mess. gaum (gôm); also used as a transitive verb: "to gaum up" (i.e., "to mess up").

• Flannel cake: pancake.
• Haint: used in the context of "ghost" or "spirit" not the derivation of "aint"
• Holler: n. hollow, as in a valley between two hills, e.g., "...I...continue to travel between hollers and cities."
• Hull: v. shell, as in to shell beans.
• Ill: bad-tempered.
• Jacket: n. vest.
• Jarfly: cicada.
• Kyarn: (Carrion) Dead flesh, such as roadkill. That smells like kyarn.
• Lamp oil/coal oil: kerosene.
• Lay out: to be truant (e.g., to "lay out of school" or "lay out of work").
• Meeting: a gathering of people for religious purposes.
• Nary/Nary'ne: none
• Palings: fence posts.
• Piece: distance (e.g., "He'd have went up the road a piece to get on the main road").
• Piece: n. snack.
• Plum or plumb: completely (e.g., "Son, you're plum crazy")
• Poke: n. brown paper bag
• Poke sallet: n. a type of salad made from boiled greens (usually pokeweed). Spelled variously salat, salit, and similar variations.
• Pokestock/polkstalk: n. a single shot shotgun; historically a rifle with an unusually long barrel popular with Kentucky frontiersmen.
• Quare: Queer (totally unrelated to sexuality), strange, odd (as in, "He's shore a quare 'un").
• Reckon: suppose. I reckon you don't like soup beans.
• Right smart: good deal of (e.g., "a right smart piece" for "a long way").
• Skift: dusting of snow.
• Slap: full, complete (e.g., "...a fall in the river, which went slap-right and straight down").
• Smart: hard-working, "work-brickle." Example: “She’s a smart womern—always a-cleanin and a-sewin and a-cookin fer ‘er famly.”
• Sop: gravy.
• Springhouse: n. a building (usually positioned over a stream) used for refrigeration before the advent of refrigerators.
• Sugar tree: n. Sugar Maple tree.
• Swan: (also swanny) swear; declare to be true.
• Toboggan: n. A knit hat or tuque; rarely used to describe a type of sled.
• Tow sack: burlap sack.
• Whistle pig: n. groundhog.
• Yonder: a directional adverb meaning distant from both the speaker and the listener (e.g., "Look over yonder").