Yankee

How to spell yankee

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce yankee

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does yankee mean?

1. nounAn American, especially as used informally outside the United States to mean any citizen of that country.
2. nounIn the United States, a person from the northern states, especially New England.

Yankee in a sentence

• The British tourists jokingly called their loud new friend a yankee.

• After the Civil War many a Southern farmer resented the visiting yankee.

• In the pub he was teased as a yankee because of his Texan accent.

• Her grandfather, a proud yankee from Vermont, distrusted anything fried.

Where does yankee come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Yankee is a famously slippery word whose exact origin is uncertain, which is part of why it is easy to misspell. The most widely accepted explanation traces it to Dutch settlers in colonial America, where it likely began as Janke, a diminutive of the very common name Jan (the Dutch form of John), so it meant something like 'little John' or 'Johnny'. An alternative Dutch theory combines Jan with Kees (a pet form of Cornelis), giving Jan-Kees as a mocking nickname for the Dutch themselves. By the middle of the eighteenth century English speakers were using it, often disparagingly, for the colonists of New England, and during the American Revolution the colonists proudly reclaimed it, most memorably in the song 'Yankee Doodle'. The spelling settled with the unusual -ankee ending, where the hard 'k' sound is written with a 'k' rather than the 'c' an English speaker might expect, a holdover from its Dutch shaping. Because the origin is genuinely disputed, the safest summary is that it is Dutch in flavour but uncertain in detail.

How the word is built

• yankee (one whole word; no separable prefix or suffix, though the -ee ending mimics a familiar diminutive pattern)