How to Use hillbilly in a Sentence

hillbilly

noun
  • It’s been called hokey, a pastime for Appalachian hillbillies and much worse.
    — John Metcalfe, Mercury News, 21 Feb. 2026
  • Cousins, hillbillies, and range brothers Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar have teamed up for another song.
    — Hattie Lindert, Pitchfork, 20 Feb. 2026
  • Meanings The meanings assigned to the hillbilly and the rhetoric in which the hillbilly has appeared has varied throughout the term’s history.
    — Jordana Rosenfeld, Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 June 2026
  • Other Arizonans at the time voiced similar concerns of being depicted as rednecks and hillbillies.
    — Paige Moore, AZCentral.com, 25 Sep. 2025
  • Spoofing slashers and their tired cliches with a new perspective, the comedy features Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine as good-natured hillbillies assumed to be backwoods psycho killers by a bunch of college students.
    — Brian Truitt, USA Today, 18 Oct. 2025
  • Kahn, an immigrant from Laos who loves to needle Hank for being a hillbilly, was voiced by a white actor, Toby Huss, during King of the Hill’s original Fox run, which ended in 2009.
    — Dave Nemetz, TVLine, 8 Aug. 2025
  • The film ushered in a horror subgenre of stories of modern suburbanites and city folk suffering a gory demise at the hands of deranged hillbillies, notably including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977).
    — Jordana Rosenfeld, Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 June 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hillbilly.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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