11 Words Virginians Use That Confuse Everyone Else

A new hire at a Roanoke office layers up for her first Blue Ridge winter and asks a coworker where she can grab a toboggan before the weekend hike.

He points her toward the hat aisle at Kroger, not the sled rack at Walmart.

These are the words Virginians use without a second thought that leave everyone else stuck on “wait, what?”

1. The 757

Ask someone from Hampton Roads where they grew up, and Virginia isn’t usually the first word out of their mouth.

They’ll say the 757.

The number covers Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, and the rest of the Hampton Roads waterfront, and residents wear it the way New Yorkers wear a borough.

In 2019, the Hampton Roads Chamber rebranded the entire region “The 757,” betting a number would stick with people longer than any list of city names.

The bet paid off.

Regulators approved a second area code, 948, in 2020, once the original 757 numbers started running thin.

It took effect in 2022, when ten-digit dialing became mandatory just to keep every call connected.

Call it “Hampton Roads” to a local, and they’ll usually let it slide.

Get too formal about the city names, and a local might just correct you.

It’s the 757.

2. Commonwealth

Why does Virginia’s own paperwork never say “state”?

Every court filing, budget bill, and license plate renewal reads “Commonwealth of Virginia” instead, right down to the seal on the governor’s letterhead.

Correct someone who calls it a state, and a native might correct you right back.

The distinction dates to Virginia’s constitution of 1776, later copied by Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, meant to signal a government built on the people’s consent rather than a king’s.

Legally, the title changes nothing.

The Library of Congress says so outright: A commonwealth carries the exact same powers as any other state in the union.

None of that stops a Virginian from saying it anyway.

3. NoVa

“You’re basically still in D.C.,” a friend from Richmond might tease a Northern Virginia commuter.

They shrug it off.

Locals call the region NoVa, short for Northern Virginia, the stretch of Washington, D.C. suburbs that includes Arlington, Fairfax, and Loudoun counties.

The commute is real.

NoVa runs on Beltway traffic, Metro stops, and a tech-and-government economy that feels closer to Capitol Hill than to the Blue Ridge.

Drive south past Fredericksburg, and the same joke flips: Locals there say NoVa barely counts as Virginia at all.

Many Virginians say it half joking, half not.

4. Hokie

Virginia Tech fans call themselves Hokies.

Outsiders usually guess it’s some kind of animal.

It isn’t.

In 1896, Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College became Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

That year, a senior named O.M. Stull won a student contest to write the school a brand-new cheer.

He needed a word that sounded good shouted across a football field, so he invented a word instead.

By his own account, “Hokie” meant nothing at all.

The word stuck anyway.

Blacksburg fans now answer to it before they answer to their own names.

5. Wahoo

University of Virginia (UVA) students and fans go by Wahoos, or just “Hoos” for short.

Nobody at a UVA game is picturing a fish.

The cheer “Wah-hoo-wa” showed up in Charlottesville by 1890.

Virginia’s own athletics department says it may have been borrowed from Dartmouth, whose teams were once nicknamed the Indians.

Rival fans from Washington and Lee turned “Wahoos” into an insult during 1890s baseball games.

UVA kept it anyway.

By 1940, the nickname was in general use around Grounds, official enough that the athletics department still embraces it today.

6. Airish

Step outside in the Blue Ridge Mountains on a raw spring morning, and a native might warn you it’s “airish.”

That means chilly and a little windy, not up in the air about anything.

The word traces back to Scottish and northern English dialects, and Virginia speech has used it since at least the 1750s, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE).

Pack a jacket.

A porch conversation about the weather in southwest Virginia can turn on that one word, and outsiders usually just nod along, guessing.

7. Poke

"Grab me a poke of those," someone might say at a rural Virginia store, nodding at the paper bags.

The clerk hands one over, no explanation needed.

That word is old, plain English for a bag or sack.

Generations of Appalachian Virginians never let it go.

It's where the old saying "a pig in a poke" comes from, a warning against buying livestock sealed in a sack, sight unseen.

Not anymore.

Mountain shoppers kept saying "poke" long after the warning behind it faded.

You'll still hear it at farmers markets and small-town counters across the mountains.

8. Might Could

"I might could do that Friday," someone in southwest Virginia might tell you when you ask for a favor.

That's two modal verbs, stacked on top of each other.

Linguists call it a double modal, a grammar feature that survives in Appalachian and Southern English long after most other American dialects dropped it.

It isn't broken grammar.

"Might could" softens a promise the way "maybe" softens a plan, leaving room to back out without ever saying no outright.

Outsiders hear it once and start correcting people who were never wrong to begin with.

9. Pack

In parts of southwestern Virginia, you don't carry firewood to the house.

You pack it.

The verb shows up in oral histories dating to the 1860s, describing hauling wood, corn, or game on someone's back or a mule's.

A backpack makes more sense once you know that history.

Say "I'll pack the groceries in" to someone from outside Appalachia, and they picture a suitcase, not a trip up the driveway.

Not luggage.

10. Holler

What's a "holler"?

That's not a shout.

Stop for directions in the mountains of southwest Virginia, and someone might send you "up the holler" instead of naming a road.

A holler is the local pronunciation of hollow, a small sheltered valley tucked between ridges, and the word shows up constantly in Appalachian place names.

Families have lived in the same holler for generations, close enough to wave at a neighbor's porch light across the ridge.

Flatland directions don't work out there.

Knowing which holler somebody means matters more than any street address ever could.

11. Toboggan

In Virginia, telling someone to grab a toboggan means handing over a knit hat, not a sled.

Snow is rare enough across most of Virginia that the connection between the word and a ride down a hill faded out generations ago.

Southerners started calling the cap by the sled's old name instead.

The habit spread across the region.

Ask for a toboggan at a big box store outside the South, and a clerk will walk you toward the sledding aisle instead.

That's the wrong aisle.