7 Arkansas Sayings That Leave Out-of-Towners Completely Lost
A university voice professor has recorded people in more than 100 Arkansas towns, working toward all 75 counties.
The data is clear: Arkansans don’t speak with one accent.
They also have a vocabulary that feels foreign to other Americans.
These are the Arkansas sayings that leave out-of-towners completely lost.
1. Woo Pig Sooie
A visitor at Arkansas’s Razorback Stadium watches thousands of fans throw both arms overhead and squeal like hogs, together, on cue.
Arkansas adopted the razorback hog as its mascot back in 1910.
The call itself came about a decade later, when a knot of farmers in the stands started squealing like hogs to rally a struggling football team.
The team won.
Fans have carried the call into every Razorback sport since then, not only football.
The University of Arkansas’s alumni association notes that fans naturally open any sporting event with it, basketball and baseball included.
That’s what turns it into a saying instead of just a mascot chant: Something a crowd says together, out loud, on command.
A visitor who wanders into a Little Rock sports bar during any of those seasons might wonder if a fight just broke out.
2. Arkansawyer
Newcomers hear an Arkansas native called an “Arkansawyer” and assume somebody mangled Tom Sawyer’s name.
It’s an old nickname for a person from Arkansas, and its history runs backward from what many people would guess.
“Arkansan” showed up first, in an 1851 magazine article.
“Arkansawyer” didn’t reach print until 1874, more than twenty years later, in a Texas history book.
Arkansas’s legislature muddied things further in 1881.
Lawmakers passed a resolution declaring the state’s name is correctly pronounced “Ar-kan-saw,” not “Ar-KAN-sas.”
Consistency arrived late.
That left “Arkansawyer” sounding like the more consistent word for a resident.
Writers including folklorist Vance Randolph and Ozark chronicler Otto Ernest Rayburn leaned into it for exactly that reason.
They treated the word as a badge of independence, not a slip of the tongue.
Many Arkansans still reach for it today when they want the word to carry a little extra pride.
Arkansas Has Two Accents, Not One
Arkansas splits into two separate dialect regions, and neither one matches the single “Southern accent” many outsiders expect.
Northwest Arkansas, the Ozark half of the state, speaks a Midland dialect that keeps its hard r sounds.
That’s the same family of speech spoken in the Appalachian hill country of Tennessee and West Virginia.
Southeast Arkansas, down in the Delta, drops those r’s and stretches its vowels the way Mississippi and Louisiana do.
A single road trip across the state can cross both accents before lunch.
3. Stump Water
Order sweet tea in Arkansas strong enough to coat a spoon, and the person who poured it might explain it in two words: Stump water.
A University of Arkansas researcher used that exact phrase to describe local dialect while explaining a project built to record how Arkansans talk.
Ben Corbett, an assistant professor of voice and acting at the university, has scouted and recorded people in more than 100 Arkansas towns for the effort.
His fieldwork runs from Eureka Springs to West Helena.
His goal is all 75 counties.
In his telling, stump water describes tea holding more sugar than water, the kind poured at church potlucks and family reunions across the state.
No stump required.
His recordings, housed in the International Dialects of English Archive, later grew into an Emmy-winning documentary called The Arkansas Accent Project.
Ask for stump water outside Arkansas, and many people will picture rainwater sitting in a tree stump, not a pitcher of tea.
4. A-Huntin’ and A-Fishin’
Older speakers in the Arkansas Ozarks still tack an extra syllable onto certain verbs, saying a neighbor was out a-huntin’ or a-fishin’ instead of just hunting or fishing.
The habit runs deep.
Linguists call the habit a-prefixing, and it’s one of the exact features a research team led by linguist Nanjo Dube went looking for in 1988.
The team recorded native speakers in Crawford, Franklin, Johnson, Madison, and Newton counties, five rural Arkansas counties chosen for the fieldwork.
The same project documented a second habit alongside it: Tacking “done” onto a verb to mark something as finished, as in the baby’s done gone to sleep.
Researchers found the study’s younger subjects were already dropping both habits in favor of standard English.
Use “a-workin'” or “a-huntin'” around someone who didn’t grow up in the region, and don’t be surprised when they ask you to repeat it.
5. Arkansas Toothpick
An Arkansas toothpick doesn’t clear food from your teeth.
It was large enough to end a knife fight.
Size was the point.
Local legend and an 1841 newspaper both credit blacksmith James Black of Washington, Arkansas, in Hempstead County, with refining the blade that became known as the Bowie knife.
Arkansas’s reputation for carrying and using that blade during the frontier era earned the weapon an alternate name: “Arkansas toothpick,” used interchangeably with “Bowie knife” throughout the antebellum period.
The association ran deep enough that people started calling Arkansas itself “the Toothpick State,” one of several nicknames the state carried long before it settled on The Natural State.
Ask for an Arkansas toothpick today outside a knife collector’s shop, and you’ll likely get a shrug instead of a blade.
6. Noodling
Arkansans who’ve watched a noodling special on television think they already know the word, and the state’s fishing code disagrees with them.
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission regulations define noodling as taking a fish with a pole-mounted breakaway hook or a snare-type device worked by hand underwater, not bare hands alone.
What many people picture when they hear the word, reaching bare-handed into a submerged hole and pulling a catfish out, has a separate name in the state’s code: Hogging.
The label matters legally.
Both methods run on the same regulated season, open July 15 through October 31 north and west of U.S. Highway 67, and May 15 through October 31 south and east of it.
The rules also carve out a river-by-river exception.
Hogging and noodling are both banned on the Ouachita River between the Little Missouri River and Remmel Dam.
Both methods stay open on the Arkansas River from May 15 through October 31.
A visitor who plans to go noodling in Arkansas may be legally hogging instead, and the game warden checking licenses will care about the difference even if nobody else does.
Psst! How much do you know about Arkansas beyond its sayings? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
The Natural State Quiz
Answer these questions on Arkansas history, geography, and trivia many people never learn in school. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
An Arkansas community near Conway gets its unusual name from a legend about riverboat men who drank at a tavern there until they did what?
7. Augering Around
A visitor to the Arkansas Ozarks hears "augering around" for the first time and pictures a drill bit or an ice-fishing tool, not a nosy neighbor.
There, augering around means snooping, poking through somebody else's business, or wandering around with no clear purpose.
A neighbor who keeps augering around the property line eventually hears about it.
Nobody likes it.
The word survives mostly among older generations in rural Ozark counties, documented for decades as part of the region's traditional vocabulary.
Someone caught red-handed just says they were augering around, and that usually ends the conversation.
