Yankee

The most probable ancestor of Yankee is Dutch Jan Kaas, a compound of Jan (John) and Kaas (cheese). Dutch speakers used Jan Kaas as a contemptuous nickname for Flemish people in the 17th century, roughly the equivalent of calling someone John Cheese as a stock caricature. By the 1680s the word appears in colonial correspondence to describe New England traders, likely carried there by Dutch settlers in what is now New York. The semantic transfer from Flemish stereotype to English colonial nickname is the earliest traceable step in the word's history.

By 1765 the British were using Yankee Doodle as a mocking song about ill-equipped colonial soldiers, the doodle meaning fool or simpleton in the dialect of the time. American colonists seized the insult, adopted the song, and played it at Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in 1781. The fife and drum corps struck it up as the British column marched out, and Cornwallis claimed illness rather than attend the ceremony. A taunt had become a triumph.

During the American Civil War, Yankee contracted its geography. Southerners used it specifically for Northerners, a usage that still holds in parts of the American South. Northerners used it for New Englanders. Outside the United States, it compressed further into a general term for any American, carrying different freight depending on the speaker.

The Dutch origin theory has competitors. A Cherokee word eankke, said to mean coward, has been put forward as an alternative, as has a distortion of the word English itself and a Scottish name Jankee. None of these alternatives has the documentary trail the Jan Kaas etymology provides. The Flemish insult that crossed the Atlantic and became American pride remains the most defensible account.