noun
- Midland and Southern U.S. woodpecker.
- Southern U.S. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive. poor white.
adjective
- Southern U.S. small or insignificant: He makes a living farming and running a peckerwood sawmill.
n.1859, U.S. Southern black dialectal inversion of woodpecker; in folklore, taken as the type of white folks (1929) and symbolically contrasted with blackbird.