Yankee: an American; a New Englander; a resident of a state that was part of the Union during the Civil War

Few American words have achieved the mythic status of Yankee. Today it usually refers to any American, especially one traveling outside the United States. To someone living in the southern United States, it refers to a Northerner. However, the first Yankees were New Englanders. In the decade or so before the Revolutionary War, the British often used Yankee this way, and they generally meant it as an insult. One writer describes His Majesty's soldiers in the 1770s taunting Bostonian children by "making mouths at them, calling them Yankeys, showing their posteriors. . . ." New Englanders themselves embraced the title as a term of pride in expressions like Yankee ingenuity and Yankee grit.

Several theories have been proposed for Yankee's origin. The novelist James Fenimore Cooper believed that the word came from a Native American mispronunciation of English or its French equivalent Anglais. Cooper spelled the Native American version Yengee. A problem with this derivation is that it doesn't explain why the word applied only to New Englanders at first - not all Americans - and was never used to refer to the English as opposed to Americans of English descent.

A more plausible idea is that Yankee originated with the Dutch. Linguist Harold Davis suggested in a 1938 American Speech article that the word grew out of the Dutch nickname Jantje (pronounced Yant-yuh), which translates as 'Johnny' or 'little John'. The Dutch settlers of New York -- a region once known as New Amsterdam -- did not feel particularly friendly toward their encroaching Anglo-American neighbors. They may well have invented a contemptuous nickname based on a common eighteenth-century name for the English -- John Bull. Calling Americans Little John would have been a reference to their subordinate relationship to the parent country.

Some etymologists have hypothesized that Yankee comes from a similar-sounding Dutch nickname, Janke, or alternatively, from a combination of Jan and Kees, which translates as 'John Cheese'. They speculate that either of these could reasonably have been used as a slang term for New York's early Dutch settlers. This explanation is not as likely as the one involving Jantje. As far as anyone knows, no evidence exists that Yankee was ever used to refer to the Dutch in America. Its first appearances in print are all references to British-American New Englanders.

The song "Yankee Doodle" also started out as an insult, written by a British army surgeon during the Seven Years' War. It was meant to be a satiric comment on the Americans' general scruffiness and lack of decent uniforms. The song reportedly had many verses. According to Library of Congress records, one early verse went as follows: "There is a man in our town/ I pity his condition/ He sold his oxen and his sheep/ To buy him a commission," followed by the familiar "Yankee Doodle dandy" refrain. This joke eventually backfired on the British. During the Revolutionary War, Americans defiantly adopted the song as their theme, rewriting the verses to praise General Washington and warn of American military prowess. When the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, the ragtag American military band played "Yankee Doodle."