yokel

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a person who is not very intelligent or interested in culture

   They looked like yokels, but were in fact college professors.

First use appears c. 1812, possibly from dialectal German Jokel, diminutive of Jakob, cf. Yankee (“little John”) and jacquerie (“a peasant uprising”). Alternatively, from dialectal English yokel, yuckle (“a European green woodpecker”), itself probably a variant of hickwall.

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