drawl » draw

Chiefly in:   Southern draw

Classification: English – vocalized /l/

Spotted in the wild:

  • Anywhere else in the world it would be called “win wood” Oklahoma, but here it’s “winnie wood” and we all talk like this (said in a kind of southern draw). (Susquehanna University commencement address, May 16, 2004)
  • As the slide show flipped by with illustrations of the colorful towns and people in the 1920’s, Franzwa, in his bolo tie, narrated in his slow southern draw. (Northeast News Gleaner, Philadelphia, PA, June 10, 2004)
  • While his southern draw and redneck tendencies cannot be denied, I think he is a rather progressive voice especially compared to the crew he runs with and the audience he appeals to. (Flow, Univ. of Texas Department of Radio-TV-Film, May 7, 2005)

For speakers of some dialects, draw and drawl are homophonous or nearly so. (In some cases, Southern draw may represent a pronunciation spelling imitative of the speech pattern so described.) The semantic connection between the two words is strong, since a drawl is usually identified by the drawn-out pronunciation of vowels. In fact, the word drawl may have originated as a frequentative form of draw (cf. drag, draggle).

See also drawl » brawl.

| link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/07/26 |

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