It’s an expression we’ve been using since the mid-1950s. When someone talks about “the boonies,” they mean the countryside. However, when people first began speaking of the boonies more than seven decades ago, they were referring to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Originally, boonies was a military slang term coined by U.S. troops serving in Vietnam. Back then, the word applied to the remote forests of the Vietnamese wilderness, as opposed to the more modern streets of Saigon and Hanoi. Once that meaning was established, the term came to be used more loosely in the postwar United States, referring to anywhere that was rural or out of the way compared to cities and urban areas. Why did U.S. troops come up with the word in the first place? It was a colloquial shortening of “boondocks,” which was derived from the Tagalog (language of the Philippines) word “bundok,” meaning “mountain.”
Why Do We Call the Country “the Boonies”?
It’s an expression we’ve been using since the mid-1950s. When someone talks about “the boonies,” they mean the countryside. However, when people first began speaking of the boonies more than seven decades ago, they were referring to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Originally, boonies was a military slang term coined by U.S. troops serving in Vietnam. Back then, the word applied to the remote forests of the Vietnamese wilderness, as opposed to the more modern streets of Saigon and Hanoi. Once that meaning was established, the term came to be used more loosely in the postwar United States, referring to anywhere that was rural or out of the way compared to cities and urban areas. Why did U.S. troops come up with the word in the first place? It was a colloquial shortening of “boondocks,” which was derived from the Tagalog (language of the Philippines) word “bundok,” meaning “mountain.”