From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Yankee \Yan"kee\, adjective Of or pertaining to a Yankee; characteristic of the Yankees.
The alertness of the Yankee aspect. --Hawthorne.
{Yankee clover}. (Bot.) See {Japan clover}, under {Japan}.
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Yankee \Yan"kee\, noun [Commonly considered to be a corrupt pronunciation of the word English, or of the French word Anglais, by the native Indians of America. According to Thierry, a corruption of Jankin, a diminutive of John, and a nickname given to the English colonists of Connecticut by the Dutch settlers of New York. Dr. W. Gordon (''Hist. of the Amer. War,'' ed, 1789, vol. i., pp. 324, 325) says it was a favorite cant word in Cambridge, Mass., as early as 1713, and that it meant excellent; as, a yankee good horse, yankee good cider, etc. Cf. Scot yankie a sharp, clever, and rather bold woman, and Prov. E. bow-yankees a kind of leggins worn by agricultural laborers.] A nickname for a native or citizen of New England, especially one descended from old New England stock; by extension, an inhabitant of the Northern States as distinguished from a Southerner; also, applied sometimes by foreigners to any inhabitant of the United States.
From meanness first this Portsmouth Yankey rose, And still to meanness all his conduct flows. --Oppression, A poem by an American (Boston, 1765).
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
adjective
1: used by southerners for an inhabitant of a northern state in the United States (especially a Union soldier)
noun
1: an American who lives in the North (especially during the American Civil War) [syn: {Yank}, {Northerner}]
2: an American who lives in New England [syn: {New Englander}, {Yank}]
3: an American [syn: {Yank}, {Yankee-Doodle}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
84 Moby Thesaurus words for "Yankee": Acadian, Anglo-Indian, Bolshevik, Bolshevist, Bolshie, Brooklynese, Cajun, Canadian French, Carbonarist, Carbonaro, Castroist, Castroite, Charley, Cockney, Communist, Cong, Down-Easter Yankee, Easterner, Fenian, French Canadian, Guevarist, Gullah, Jacobin, Leninist, Maoist, Marxist, Mau-Mau, Midland, Midland dialect, New England dialect, New Englander, Northener, Northman, Pennsylvania Dutch, Puritan, Red, Red Republican, Roundhead, Sinn Feiner, Trotskyist, Trotskyite, VC, Vietcong, Westerner, Yankee Doodle, Yorkshire, anarch, anarchist, bonnet rouge, bundle of isoglosses, class dialect, criminal syndicalist, dialect, dialect atlas, dialect dictionary, eastlander, idiom, isogloss, linguistic atlas, linguistic community, linguistic island, local dialect, localism, northlander, patois, provincialism, rebel, red, regional accent, regionalism, revolutionary, revolutionary junta, revolutioner, revolutionist, revolutionizer, sans-culotte, sans-culottist, southlander, speech community, subdialect, subversive, syndicalist, terrorist, westlander
From THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY ((C)1911 Released April 15 1993) [devils]:
YANKEE, noun In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See DAMNYANK.)
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