Our To Kill a Mockingbird interactive vocabulary lists are among our most popular, and like all our literature lists, they focus on academic vocabulary, or words you can expect to see often in your life as a reader and thinker, inside and outside of a literature class. 

But there's another kind of vocabulary you'll find in To Kill a Mockingbird that we word lovers get excited about as well: a vocabulary of Southern-inflected words that testify to the regional nature of American English as it was spoken three quarters of a century ago. And with the news that an imprint of HarperCollins will publish a recently rediscovered Harper Lee manuscript that continues the story of Scout from Mockingbird, we can only hope to find a rich store of Southern regionalisms there as well. 

We'll have to wait to read Lee's novel Go Set a Watchman to see, but in the meantime, here are a few Southern-inflected gems from To Kill a Mockingbird that go beyond yonder, reckon, and yessum to set the tone. 

calomel: a tasteless colorless powder used medicinally

He seemed to be all in one piece, but he had a queer look on his face. Perhaps she had given him a dose of calomel.

chiffarobe: a wardrobe with drawers (combining chiffonier and wardrobe)

“Well sir, I was on the porch and—and he came along and, you see, there was this old chiffarobe in the yard Papa’d brought in to chop up for kindlin‘—Papa told me to do it while he was off in the woods but I wadn’t feelin’ strong enough then, so he came by-”

croker-sack: a sack made of coarse material, such as burlap

One morning Jem and I found a load of stovewood in the back yard. Later, a sack of hickory nuts appeared on the back steps. With Christmas came a crate of smilax and holly. That spring when we found a crokersack full of turnip greens, Atticus said Mr. Cunningham had more than paid him.

haint: a ghost

“That yard’s a mighty long place for little girls to cross at night,” Jem teased. “Ain’t you scared of haints?”

We laughed. Haints, Hot Steams, incantations, secret signs, had vanished with our years as mist with sunrise. “

hoodooing: the use of charms and witchcraft 

Jem let me do the honors: I pulled out two small images carved in soap. One was the figure of a boy, the other wore a crude dress. Before I remembered that there was no such thing as hoo-dooing, I shrieked and threw them down.

pot liquor: liquid in which vegetables or meat have been cooked

“You know,” he said, “I’ve seen Atticus pat his foot when there’s fiddlin‘ on the radio, and he loves pot liquor better’n any man I ever saw—”

scuppernong: an amber-green muscadine grape

Our tacit treaty with Miss Maudie was that we could play on her lawn, eat her scuppernongs if we didn’t jump on the arbor, and explore her vast back lot, terms so generous we seldom spoke to her, so careful were we to preserve the delicate balance of our relationship, but Jem and Dill drove me closer to her with their behavior.