backwoods

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Origin: 1709

The English-speaking populace in the period of settlement before the American Revolution clung to the Atlantic seaboard. Places not close to the centers of habitation were somewhere else, in what was called the backwoods. The word is noted in 1709 by the author of A New Voyage to Carolina in regard to the pheasant: "He haunts the back Woods, and is seldom found near the Inhabitants."

Later in the eighteenth century we first find the name for a person who lives in the backwoods, in a 1774 letter to the Colonial Office in London: "Stired up the old inveteracy of those who are called the back-woods-men, who are Hunters like the Indians and equally ungovernable."

These backwoodsmen were self-reliant as well as independent. A certain J.F.D. Smyth, in his 1784 book A Tour in the United States of America, reported that he was "Accompanied...by my faithful back-wood's man, whom at first I considered as little better than a savage.... These American back-wood's men can perform a little...almost in every handicraft of necessary mechanical trade."

Usually the term was not a compliment. John Pickering, that early collector of Americanisms, explained in 1818 that backwoodsman was "a name given by the people of the commercial towns in the United States, to those who inhabit the territory westward of the Allegany mountains.... This word is commonly used as a term of reproach (and that only, in familiar style) to designate those people, who, being at a distance from the sea and entirely agricultural, are considered as either hostile or indifferent to the interests of the commercial states."

America had backwoods women too, though it took us until the nineteenth century to recognize them. Knickerbocker magazine in 1840 commented on "all the endless drudgery belonging to the life of a backwoods-woman." And in 1884 Ella Rhodes Higginson wrote about one in Harper's Magazine: "Mrs. Jackson--a plain, estimable backwoods-woman,...sat smoking her corn-cob pipe."

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For a list of words related to backwoods, see:

• Woods and Brush - backwoods: remote, densely forested region

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See words rhyming with "backwoodsman."

  See crossword solutions for the clue Backwoods.

Dansk (Danish)
n. pl. - stort vildt skovland

Nederlands (Dutch)
binnenlanden, afgelegen gebied

Français (French)
n. pl. - région (forestière) inexploitée, (fig, péj) trou perdu

Deutsch (German)
n. pl. - abgelegene Wälder, hinterste Provinz

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - δάση ενδοχώρας, (μτφ.) απόμακρη ή καθυστερημένη περιοχή

Italiano (Italian)
zona boschiva

Português (Portuguese)
n. - mato (m), regiões (f pl) recobertas de matas e afastadas de cidades

Русский (Russian)
чаща, глухая провинция

Español (Spanish)
n. pl. - selvas, región remota y silvestre, lugar poco desarrollado

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - obygder, avlägsna skogstrakter

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
边远蛮荒林区, 边远地区

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. pl. - 邊遠蠻荒林區, 邊遠地區

한국어 (Korean)
n. pl. - 삼림지대, 오지

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 辺境の森林地, 僻地
adj. - 僻地の, 粗野な

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) أقاصي المعمور من البلاد, بعيد عن البيوت, غابه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. pl. - ‮שטח מיוער מרוחק, מקום נידח, שממה‬

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