Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (orig. US, also red) a derog. term for a country dweller, a peasant, esp. a southern US poor farmer who is stupid and racist; strictly rednecks came from swampy areas while hillbillies, their peers, came from the mountains [their sunburn; orig. a Presbyterian, then transferred to all poor whites].

[1830		A.N. Royall Southern Tour I 148: This may be ascribed to the Red Necks, a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians in Fayetteville].
1885		Dly Honolulu Press (HI) 15 Sept. 1/2: There was an element in the Southern United States, which still exists, known to northernpeople as ‘poor white trash’ [...] ‘crackers,’ ‘dirt-eaters’ and ‘red-necks’.
1897		Canton Times (MS) 7 May 1/4: Others [...] have not yhet felt the sting of hard times as have the rest of us whom they sneeringly designate as ‘horny-handed hayseed rednecks’.
1904		J.W. Carr ‘Words from Northwest Arkansas’ in DN II:vi 420: redneck, n. An uncouth countryman. ‘The hill-billies come from the hills, and the rednecks from the swamps.’.
1914		Sun (NY) 15 Sept. 10/6: The rednecks who are making all the fuss in the mines.
1915		M.G. Hayden ‘Terms Of Disparagement’ in DN IV:iii 206: red-neck, an uncouth countryman.
1929		(con. WWI) H. Odum Wings on My Feet 281: Some quality white folks on board, some po’ white trash. [...] Some crackers an’ hill-billies, some red necks an’ sagers.
c.1930		(ref. to late 19C) N. Kimball Amer. Madam (1981) 251: A rich family who had been crackers and rednecks three grandmothers back.
1942		Z.N. Hurston ‘Story in Harlem Sl.’ in Novels and Stories (1995) 1010: Red neck: poor Southern white man.
1947		Newsweek 1 Sept. 19/2: The rednecks were the poverty-stricken, white tenant farmers and share-croppers who lived in the piney woods and barren red-clay hills behind the Delta [DA].
1957		D. Alexander ‘Bad Word’ in Best of Manhunt (2019) [ebook] There were so many rednecks like us that got to be followers of the Preacher.
1965		(con. 1930s) R. Wright Lawd Today 177: ‘Crackers!’ ‘Rednecks!’ ‘Hillbillies!’.
1974		D. Goines Swamp Man 53: This is one redneck who wouldn’t be here now.
1987		C. Hiaasen Double Whammy (1990) 14: Who cares if some dumb shitkicker redneck cheats with a fish?
1999		Guardian Guide 5–12 June 73: The city’s former image as a redneck and Ku Klux Klan hotspot has been eclipsed by a black mayor.
2005		L. Redhead Rubdown [ebook] Occupational hazard when you work with dumb-arse rednecks.
2006		G. Iles Turning Angel 338: The rednecks in the trucks are doing crystal meth.
2012		A. Nette ‘Chasing Atlantis’ in Crime Factory: Hard Labour [ebook] [in Aus. context] A couple of heavies to keep the local rednecks at bay.
2012		C. Stella Rough Riders 85: Pick City, where Lynette lived with the rednecks.
2017		D. Winslow The Force [ebook] If the rednecks on the Job don’t like it, fuck them.
2020		S.A. Crosby Blacktop Wasteland 192: ‘A bunch of backwoods racist rednecks’.

2. (Irish) a yokel [borrows f. sense 1].

1977		W. Burrowes Riordans 89: Murph, who drove a motor-bike and spoke in a strange tongue about culchies and rednecks.
1994		(con. 1920s) K.C. Kearns Dublin Tenement Life 68: The sheriff, he was always a red-neck, a culchie.

3. (S.Afr.) an English immigrant. [Boer War era redneck, a British soldier, f. his uniform and the sunburn].

1898		Empire 29 Jan. in Pettman Africanderisms 412: In South Africa, Englishmen, owing to their more rosy complexion, as compared with other white men living there, are jocosely spoken of as ‘red necks’ (rooi nek in Transvaal Dutch, roodnek in the Dutch of Holland) .
1900		A.H. Keane glossary in Boer States xviii: Rooinek, ‘Red-neck’, in reference originally to some merinos introduced by an English farmer into the Free State, and marked with a red brand on the neck. These were spoken of as red-necks — an expression afterwards extended to the English themselves, and then as a term of contempt to the British troops in red uniform .
1900		N.Y. Tribune 3 Jan. 6/2: Colesberg is the pl;ace dear to every Boer [...] He has always hated the idea of letting his birthplace remain in the hands of the ‘damned Rednecks,’ and has always cherished the hope of one day redeeming it fro the British sway.
1921		Chambers’s Journal (UK) Jan. 32: I was thinking of the efforts that that infernal rooinek (red-neck) of a son of yours is making to deprive me of my only child [DSAE].
1936		R. Campbell ‘Mithraic Emblems’ in Sel. Poems (1955) 178: To find a redneck cheap upon this day You do not need to wander far away .
1944		J. Mockford Here Are S. Africans 83: The South Africans — Dutch and British, Boer and Red-neck — were [...] living a colonial and frontier life enriched by the manufactured products of mid-Victorian England [DSAE].
1961		T. Matshikiza Chocolates for my Wife 85: They called us boers that time when we were fighting with English Red Necks. They called us Boers then .
1972		J. McClure Caterpillar Cop 18: What’s this with the Redneck? [...] Another bloody English immigrant?
1990		P.-D. Uys Part Hate Part Love (1994) 368: She – a Brit? A hated redneck?
2008		Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg) 7 Feb. 🌐 Apart from being racist, these rednecks are known for being rude.

4. (US) an Irish immigrant.

1917		B. Hecht ‘A Doting Burglar’ in All-Story 6 Oct. You don’t think that any kidney-footed, red-necked copper is going to nail me!
1955		B. Schulberg On the Waterfront (1964) 124: Big Mac was just a vulgar red-neck.

5. (US) a hot-tempered person.

1961

L. Shecter Roger Maris 142: He's a moaner rather than a redneck, a complainer rather than an angry man.