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The origins of yokel are uncertain, but it might have come from the dialectal English word yokel used as the name for the green woodpecker (the nickname is of imitative origin). Other words for supposedly naive country folk are chawbacon (from chaw, meaning "chew," and bacon), hayseed (which has obvious connections to country life), and clodhopper (indicating a clumsy, heavy-footed rustic). But city slickers don't always have the last word: rural folk have had their share of labels for city-dwellers too. One simple example is the often disparaging use of the adjective citified. A more colorful (albeit historical) example is cockney, which literally means "cocks' egg," or more broadly "misshapen egg." In the past, this word often designated a spoiled or foppish townsman—as opposed to the sturdy countryman, that is.
Synonyms
Examples of yokel in a Sentence
oregonlive, 5 Sep. 2023
And, with perhaps the canniest remark on the design’s yokel-ness, someone else claimed to have seen the new logo wandering around Rockefeller Center asking for the Christmas tree.
—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 23 Mar. 2023
The team brings up a yokel from the minor leagues, Shane (Michael Oberholtzer), to relieve him, and Shane’s gruesome, heartfelt (and English-language) bigotry finally shakes the team to its roots.
—Helen Shaw, Vulture, 4 Apr. 2022
The first comic, Charles F. Browne, hit the lecture circuit in 1861 and adopted the pseudonymous persona of a country yokel named Artemus Ward.
—Harry Bruinius, The Christian Science Monitor, 29 Nov. 2021
At first he was depicted as a country yokel, but by the end of that first season the puppet’s operator, Carroll Spinney, had changed tack.
—The Economist, 14 Dec. 2019
King himself directed this gloriously goofy adaptation of a short story from his Night Shift collection about a group of local yokels trapped in a roadside truck stop by a convoy of killer big rigs.
—Matthew Chernov, chicagotribune.com, 5 Sep. 2019
Urbanites defined themselves as forward-looking sophisticates who sneered at yokels in backwaters; cosmopolitanism faced off against parochialism.
—Sarah Churchwell, The New York Review of Books, 7 Feb. 2019
Every single in-game model, from huge wooden shacks to flying spaceships, and from slack-jawed yokels to individual blades of grass, has been handsomely redrawn by this remaster's development team.
—Sam MacHkovech, Ars Technica, 11 June 2019
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'yokel.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
perhaps from English dialect yokel green woodpecker, of imitative origin
circa 1819, in the meaning defined above
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Cite this Entry
“Yokel.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/yokel. Accessed 16 Apr. 2024.
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yokel
noun
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