December 4, 1997

boondocks

I would like to request the history of the word "boondocks." I suspect it has something to do with docks a long way from a population center.

The "long way from a population center" is connected to the meaning, but both the "boon" and the "docks" are accidental and have no etymological relation to English words.

The slang word boondocks, which means 'a remote rural area', is a borrowing from Tagalog, an Austronesian language of the Philippines. The Tagalog word was bundoc 'a mountain'; the meaning was extended in English to refer to 'wilds of any sort' and 'a remote area'. The spelling of the word in English was conformed to the familiar words boon and dock; the -s ending of English boondocks is a common ending for locative derivations such as the dumps, the sticks, and others.

Boondocks was borrowed by American soldiers stationed in the Philippines, and first appears in English in the early 1900s. The word reached mainstream currency in America only in the 1960s.

Some derived words are boondock as a verb meaning 'to go into or through rural areas'; boondocker, a common Marine Corps word for a combat boot and also for a serviceman from a remote area (both from World War II); and boonies, a shortened version of boondocks found from the 1950s onward.